





1 x W 






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LIBILARYOF COJffGttESS 




Truths for To-Day 



SECOND SEEIES. 



By DAVID SWING, 

Pastor Central Church. 










CHICAGO: 
JANSEST, McCLUEG AND COMPANY. 

1876. 




&8 A*-*-" 



Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1876, by 

JANSEN, McCLURG & CO., 
In the office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. 



PRINTED AT THE LAKESIDE PRESS, CHICAGO. 



COXTE^TS 



SERMON I. 

CHRIST. 
Job 11 : 7. — Canst thou by searching find out God? - - 11 



SERMON II. 

THE SURROUNDINGS OF CHRIST. 

Matthew 2 : 10. — And when they saw the star they rejoiced 
with exceeding great joy - - - 31 

SERMON III. 
INFLUENCE OF CHRIST ON LETTERS AND ART. 

Matthew 7 : 16. — Ye shall know them by their fruits - - 49 



6 CONTENTS. 



SERMON IV. 

INFLUENCE OF CHRIST ON THE HUMAN SPIRIT. 
Luke 9 : 55. — Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of - 67 



SERMON V. 

MINOR QUALITIES OF CHRIST- - - 85 



SERMON VI. 

THE FUTURE OVERWORKED. 
2 Corinthians 6 : 2. — Now is the accepted time - - - 103 



SERMON VII. 

AMONG THE FOUNDATIONS. 

Hebrews 11 : 38. — Of whom the world was not worthy - 121 



CONTENTS. 



SERMON VIII. 

A PLEA FOR THE BETTER CLASSES. 

Matthew 9 : 17. — Neither do men put new wine into old 
bottles 141 

SERMON IX. 

THE BIBLE AND THE COMMON PEOPLE. 
Psalms 119 : 130.— The entrance of Thy word giveth light - 161 

SERMON X. 

CHRISTIAN HEROISM. 
Matthew 28 : 19.— Go ye, therefore, and teach all nations - 179 



SERMON XI. 
YOUTH, ITS DUTIES AND PRIVILEGES. 

"£cclesiastes, 12th Chapter - - - - - 197 



8 CONTENTS. 



SERMON XII. 

A GREAT GOD. 

Psalms 95 : 3. — For the Lord is a great God - 217 

SERMON XIII. 

THE EMPIRE OF LAW. 

Psalms 119 : 97.— Oh, how love I Thy law! It is my medi- 
tation all the day - 237 

SERMON XIV. 

THE INFLUENCE OF ATHEISM UPON MORALS. 

Psalms 90: 1. — Lord, thou hast been our dwelling-place in 
all generations - - .._..-_ 257 

SERMON XV. 

THE TRUE LIBERALISM. 

Luke 9 : 50. — Forbid him not, for he that is not against us 
is for us - - - - - - - - . - 277 



CHEIST. 



SERMON I 

CHRIST. 



" Canst thou by searching find out God ? "—Job 11 : 7. 

~T~ ET us continue to-day the general reflections 
-"-^. begun last Sunday over the name of Christ. 
I shall not ask you to mark more of His minor 
virtues, but some of the facts in His most wonderful 
history. Of all divine or presumably divine persons, 
we m^j remark, in the first place, that Christ comes 
nearest to being a fact. The history of religion is 
a history of incarnations of Deity. The pagan ages 
surpassed the Christian in the quantity of the divine- 
human. All the woods, and mountains, and rivers, 
and seas, were full of beings that were above man 
and full of the eternal essence. The terrible, and the 
beautiful, and the good, culminated in some form that 
could sit upon an Olympus, or could run through 
the woods with garments flowing about the feet, or 
that could drive a chariot over the wave. Of all 



12 CHRIST. 



these stories so woven into the history of religion, 
the story of Christ is the one that comes nearest to 
perfect verification according to all the laws of 
human evidence. None of the great classic or 
Asiatic writers pretend to have seen the great super- 
human ideas in whose name they worshiped. Venus, 
Juno, Jupiter, Prometheus, Osis, Osiris, were only 
long-continued dreams of the generations. They 
were like the toy-bringing god of our Christmas, 
only the incarnation of the world's wish and infant 
thought. Once the world was peopled by only a 
race of infants. As our children believe in the 
Christmas god, the ancients believed in the group 
upon Olympus gathered about an ambrosial feast. 

It is evident that when the Creator formed man 
he placed within him a religious sentiment, a sense of 
a superior existence, and this being the nature of 
the subjective mind, the outer realm became at once 
peopled with supernatural creatures. As the fever- 
stricken dream of fountains of water, so the religious 
nature of man dreams of gods. In its ignorant age 
it sees deity in wood or stone, and sees hundreds 
or thousands of them. The modern Hindoo says he 
believes in three hundred millions of gods. This 
confession is valuable, for it shows the inner religious 
sentiment looking out of the mind ; and while the 



CHRIST. 13 



details are false, there the sentiment stands in its 
power, and proclaims the presence of divinity in the 
universe. Paul says there is a law in the spirit that 
reveals the Infinite One. and that on this account 
all souls are responsible for the conduct of life. 
Xow this inner sentiment, in its power, which has 
always surpassed its information, has peopled the air 
with divinities, crude, feeble, great, or monstrous. 
according to the surroundings of the brain. A 
faculty or an instinct does not include the right use 
of the faculty or instinct. The sentiment of music 
in the soul did not involve the immediate discovery 
of the piano or the arrangement at once of a sym- 
phony, but involved only a long struggle and a long 
period of littleness. The religious feeling in the 
soul thus struggled along, and in the first years of 
its strivings saw gods in every storm, and in every 
ray of sunshine, and in all the shadows of the night. 
Paul says God so made the rational world that they 
should " seek the Lord if haply they may feel after 
him and find him." All the mythological and theo- 
logical phenomena of the past are manifestations of 
this feeling after the true God. Often have the best 
men given up the pursuit, and have become skeptics 
or have erected an altar to the unknown God. One 
of the sasres said: "What God is. I know not: what 



14 CHMIST. 



he is not, I know." One of the classic poets said : 
" O Jupiter, thy name is all I know." The great 
Bible rhapsodist, Job, says : " Who, by searching, can 
find out God ?" Pliny uttered a similar feeling in 
the words, " What is God? If, in truth, he be any 
thing distinct from nature, it is beyond the compass 
of man's understanding to know." The utterances 
from leading intellects of antiquity show that there 
has always been going forward a great search after 
God, and that all the religious ideas of antiquity are 
the fruits of that search. The interminable list of 
deities, from Odin to Buddha, and Jove and Apollo, 
are the fruits of the profound study of the old 
world. 

In the midst of these scenes, Christ stands the 
nearest of all alleged divinities to any historical 
fact. I do not forget that there have been claims 
to divine honors set up by others. Herod pro- 
claimed himself a god. Others have set forth the 
same tempting report. But a few years have 
brought to nothingness these boasting ones all along 
the path of history. So utter has been the failure 
of the human aspirants after divine fame, and so 
hidden by mists of legend has been all the host of 
pagan deities, that we feel justified in saying that, 
of all embodiments of the divine, Christ stands 



CHBIST. 15 



nearest the domain of fact. Above all other super- 
human ones He stands farthest from myth, and nearest 
to reality. Mark, then, the superiority of Christ as 
a fact. The Christian poet can not say, with the 
classic, "All I know of thee is thy name," and they 
that erect an altar to him can not write over it, to 
" the unknown God." The reality of Jesus is as 
definite, as undeniable, as the reality of Washington 
or Franklin. All the other incarnations belong to 
the atmosphere of legend. No twelve disciples 
gathered daily around the feet of Olympian Jove, 
or of the beautiful Apollo, nor of the gifted Minerva. 
No multitude gathered upon the mountain-side to 
hear and see the Hercules and Aphrodite. If some 
crowd, acting in the historic period, in the days of 
language and words, had followed the Apollo along 
the streets of Jerusalem or Athens, and had even 
crucified him, then would the Christian Gospel 
confess a rival in the pagan pages. But it was 
the misfortune of all that Olympian group that 
there was no Judas to betray any one of them with 
a kiss, and no Pilate to order any one of them to 
the cross. They all lived outside the bounds of 
evidence, and hence to-day appear only like the 
pictures of the virtues or the graces, outward 
expressions of the inner soul. They were the 



16 CHMIST. 



efforts of mankind to find the hidden One. In 
Christ, therefore, the idea of an incarnate God first 
touched history and passed over from legend to 
evidence. Even the Jews, the race most hostile to 
the claims of this Messiah, did not deny His exist- 
ence, but in the early centuries said that He 
performed his wonders by possessing himself of the 
ineffable name stolen from the holy place of the 
temple. Many as are the opinions as to the nature 
of Christ, there is no denial anywhere, from the 
earliest Christian to the last, that Jesus Christ lived 
and did almost such as recorded in the Gospel. 

Exhausting no more of your time and, perhaps, 
of your patience, too, upon a question which no one 
denies, let us reflect upon our second theme, namely, 
the quality of the fact. Here is the enigma of the 
religious world. Confessing the reality of Christ, 
the multitude of thinkers and toilers out of theology 
and in it, out of the Church and in it, wonder and 
wonder just what quality to attach to the Christ- 
idea. Here we can not come with any perfect peace 
for the intellect. Not only was there a great search 
before Christ, a search in which Plato, and Cato, and 
Cicero, and Epictetus, and Aurelius, and all the 
great ones engaged, feeling after God if haply 
they might find Him, but there is a search going 



CHRIST. 17 



forward still, as absolute in our day as in the days of 
the doubting Socrates or praying Aurelius. Christ's 
advent into the domain of evidence has greatly 
modified this pursuit after the unknown God, and 
in the hearts of millions of human beings has put 
the deep inquiry to rest. For eighteen centuries 
thousands upon thousands have found in Him a 
peace that knows no storm. But nothing but death 
can solve, to all, all the enigmas of earth, and hence 
to-day the immense seeking for light goes on, and a 
large multitude asks, " What shall we believe about 
this Saviour?" I can not speak peace to this troubled 
sea, I only confess the presence of the storm, and 
feel that many noble souls are out in the ruffled 
water. Each one must calmly measure for himself 
the value of the Christ, and do this " with charity 
toward all and malice toward none." 

Let me to-day ask you to think of the less 
questionable elements in this historic fact. 

1. It was a great gain to our race that at last 
the search for an Incarnation came up to a real, 
visible being. Man had gone about as far as he 
could upon a theology of legend and absurdity. 
There was no valuable religious faith in the world 
at the time of the Advent. The great Roman Empire 
could confer upon its scattered states arts and lan- 
2 



18 CHRIST. 



guage and law and pleasure, but was unable to 
bestow any religion. One of the Roman writers 
said, " Even our children no longer believe in our 
divinities." One of the prayers of Pliny was " for 
a new consolation, great and strong, of which he had 
not yet heard or read." A Latin sage said, "I need 
a God who can speak to me and can lead me." Dr. 
Arnold finds somewhere in the writings of Aurelius 
" that he was sad and agitated, stretching out his 
arms for something beyond." Cicero had declared 
that the " Academy could prove nothing." The 
Roman Empire had all forms of greatness except 
religious faith. Weary of legend, cultured bej^ond 
the credulity that believes without evidence, the 
Roman Empire was ready for an advent of fact. In 
the Man of Nazareth the dim gates of mythology 
were closed and the gates of evidence were opened. 
Here was One that could speak to the multitude, 
and the hem of whose garment might be touched. 
Here was One who could say " blessed " to the 
unblessed crowd, and whose feet a Magdalene might 
bathe with tears. Here was One who could feed a 
multitude in the wilderness, who could comfort the 
dying and the living, and could allow a mortal like 
John to rest against His bosom. That wonderful 
chain of facts, stretching from the manger to the 



C HEIST. 19 



tomb, was the first entrance of the divine upon the 
visible, and hence upon the real. The Psalmist had 
said, " Clouds and darkness are round about Him." 
What the modern spirit experiences as an occasional 
flow of melancholy was the constant feeling of all 
the noble ones of antiquity. Many of the most 
excellent sought death because it was supposed to 
be an end of sorrow ; a sweet, dreamless sleep. 
What our poets dream of in lonely hours, most of 
the old sages carried about all the while in their 
hearts : 

Would this weary life was spent, 
Would this fruitless search were o'er, 
And rather than such visions, blessed 
The gloomiest depths of nothingness. 

Such a poem shadows forth the occasional sadness 
of the present, but the almost universal darkness of 
classic Rome. 

But as Christ was year hj year unfolded in Pal- 
estine, both during His life and after His crucifixion, 
the world seemed to say, " What are all those images 
in the Pantheon compared with this new reality ?" 

Mankind will always exchange legend for history. 
The development of reason works against myth and 
in favor of the actual. Myths are welcome only to 
childish ages. If now the reason of many rise up 



20 CHRIST. 



against Christ as being not sufficiently real, not 
absolutely proven, what must have been the revolt 
of reason against the chimeras of the classic religion, 
when such a manifest reality as Jesus was standing 
at the door of their temples, and even beating against 
their hearts ? To a world that had been once satis- 
fied with the Olympian gods, the presence of Christ 
was an overwhelming argument. That era had not 
been accustomed to proof, only to tradition, and 
hence Christ must have been to them a perfect 
surprise, a sudden solution of a mystery. 

But let us examine further the quality of this 
Christ-idea. It was the first incarnation lying within 
the field of evidence, and hence, as I have stated, 
the Nazarene sets forth with peculiar value and 
charm. But how far was this Christ an incarnation 
of the divine ? Here we approach the greatness of 
the fact. Let us avoid the complications that would 
arise over any study of the Trinity. The recent 
convention at Bonn, and indeed the whole history of 
the Christian theological debate, warns us against 
any effort to weigh fully the divine in Christ, or out 
of Him. The Methodist journal of this city declared 
last week, in speaking of Dollinger's "filioque," that 
attempts to understand the Trinity were utterly use- 
less. Hence declining all debate over the doctrine 



CHRIST. 21 



of the Three-in-One, let us, as free minds unincum- 
bered by formulas, look at the divine quality of 
Christ. (1.) It should soften the judgment of us 
all in this matter, that we do not know the nature 
of Deity. If we knew the nature of Deity as we 
know the nature of earth, air, and water, we might 
become very decided over this question of the Incar- 
nation, and might declare the heavenly element 
present or absent as a chemist takes an ore, and 
after an analysis declares the presence or absence of 
gold. It is not in human power thus to affirm and 
deny, over the great crucible of nature in which lies 
a soul. It is a little illogical, to state it in its 
mildest form, for any one to approach the historic 
Christ and declare the utter absence of Deity, for 
such a decision reposes upon the assumption that 
man knows what divinity is, as he knows the mate- 
rial elements. As in the theological kingdom, men 
are deemed arrogant who presume to know all about 
God and who will talk mcessantl} T about Three-in- 
One, so not wholly free from assumption are those 
who will hasten to declare Christ to be wholly sep- 
arated from any element above the loftiest human 
life. For mark the difficulty of the situation. No 
one knows what God is. Hence, no one may hasten 
to affirm His absence or presence. Mark the distin- 



22 CHRIST. 



guished pantheists who, with their deep culture and 
with a logic difficult to meet, have declared all the 
universe to be God. Nature says to them : 

" I wander up and down ; I wander to and fro, 
and in all the roaring loom of time I weave the 
living garments of the Deity." 

Another poet says to the soul : 

Dost thou not see 

Thy limitless expanse of destiny; 

Because within thy soul 

There dwells the vision of the whole. 

The fourteenth proposition of Spinoza reads thus : 
" There is no substance but God, nor can any other 
be conceived." Thus the human intellect in its 
highest estate has been unable to draw a definite 
line around man, and thus shut out. the supreme 
soul. It does not follow from this that the doctrine 
of pantheism is as credible as the doctrine of an 
Incarnate Messiah ; but it does follow that none of 
us are in an intellectual condition that will justify 
us in treating with any contempt the idea that God 
is in Christ, reconciling the world to himself. We 
are such strangers to the quality of the Infinite One 
that we dare not declare him absent from the Man 
of Nazareth. One thing is certain, that if the Creator 
of the world ever has come or shall come within the 



ciirtst. 23 



reach of the human senses, it must have been or must 
be by coming within the confines of our world. If, 
then, the whole human family has been grieving over 
an absent God, an invisible, inaccessible, formless, 
voiceless God, and has prayed that he would break 
through the impenetrable clouds and come near His 
children, it is a capricious logic that will then reject 
a Christ because the Deity can not enter a limited 
world. A strange world, that will pray for a mani- 
fest God and then reject the idea of a manifestation ! 
Such are the difficulties that attend a peremptory 
rejection of the doctrine of the Incarnation, difficul- 
ties that may well open the heart to what evidence 
there may be upon the great New Testament shore. 
I am not ready to confess that God never would 
become limited by a body for the welfare of His 
children, nor ready to confess that He ever could 
become thus limited in a manner better, more im- 
pressive than in the person of Christ. 

In order to exclude God from Bethlehem I must 
first know what God is. 

There is every reason for supposing that man was 
created in the intellectual likeness of God, and hence 
for God to become manifest in Christ was only a 
filling to the full of a cup partly filled in the creation 
of man. Man himself held a part of the divine image. 



24 CHRIST. 



Christ held it all. The words which Christ spoke 
were divine words. The human mind can not dream 
of any thing more divine. His love was the nearest 
infinite of any thing we can conceive ; His whole 
career was just such a career as the divine would 
need to live if it should condescend to pass a few 
years upon earth. In fact, the picture of Jesus 
Christ is the best picture conceivable of a mingling 
of the earthly and the heavenly. The whole scene 
is above life and below the infinite. It was God 
brought down and man lifted up. 

Eighteen hundred years have passed — years of 
marvelous experimentation and of intellectual pro- 
gress. We who assemble here to-day will hear no 
voice from the sky telling us that Christ is above 
the human. No witnesses will come down from the 
heavens to tell us that the Jesus who was crucified is 
sitting at the right hand of God greeting with love 
His children as they pass up from earth through 
death's iron gate. We must walk along in the light 
we possess here — the light of common evidence, an 
evidence woven out of history, experience, testimony, 
and out of the humility that confesses that God 
may, for aught we know, tabernacle in the flesh. 
There have been great minds that have felt the 
Infinite One to be present in the winds and in the 



CHRIST. 25 



flowers. They have seen Him in the sun and in 
the outspread universe. There may be a grand and 
powerful logic that sees Him in a Jesus Christ. 
Do not fear that you will believe too much miracle. 
When man believes in himself, he has broken the 
spell of reason, for there is no reason that can explain 
the evidence or nature of man. The Incarnate God 
is little more wonderful than the incarnate man. It 
is not of avail to reject the miracle of a Christ and 
leave the miracle of the universe untouched. I have 
said that minds, the most careful, the most logical, 
the most free, may cheerfully accept the Christ-idea. 
May! They have so done with perfect joy. Permit 
me to quote from some who knew no yoke of 
prejudice, and feared no condemnation of council or 
synod or pope. The testimony of those who are 
born into a system, and whose lives are those of 
servile obedience rather than of manly thought, 
would be worthless in your presence. Hence, let 
me repeat the words of a Carlyle : "He walked in 
Judea 1,800 years ago : His sphere melody, flowing 
in wild, native tones, took captive the ravished souls 
of men, and, being of a truth sphere melody, still 
flows and sounds, though now with thousand-fold 
accompaniments and rich symphonies, through all our 
hearts, and modulates and divinely leads them." 



26 CHBIST. 



Franklin, in a letter to President Stiles, of Yale 
College, says : "I think Christ's morals and religion 
the best the world ever saw, or is likely to see, and 
while, with most of the dissenters in England, I 
have some doubts about His divinity, it is a question 
about which I never dogmatize, having never studied 
it. I shall know about it soon." This Franklin 
died a month afterward, thus showing us what a 
longing and tenderness were in that word " soon." 

Charles Dickens, in his will, said : " I commit my 
soul to the mercy of God, through our Lord and 
Saviour Jesus Christ, and exhort my children humbly 
to try to guide themselves by the teachings of the 
New Testament." 

William Ellery Channing says : " Jesus not only 
was, He is still, the Son of God, the Saviour of the 
world. He has entered that Heaven to which He 
always looked forward on earth. There He lives 
and reigns. With a calm, clear faith I see Him in 
that state of glory, and I confidently expect, at no 
distant period, to see Him face to face." 

Such are some of the conclusions reached by 
intellects the most gifted and the most free. In a 
world where the mind is limited, and can not find 
more than half an answer to the question, What is 
man ? or, What is nature ? it must not wait a full 



CHRIST. 27 



answer to the question, What is Christ? We must 
love the grand half-visions of this world. Like 
Moses, being unable to see the face of the Almighty, 
we must be content with the rustle of his flowing 
garments. Unable fully to measure the Christ, let 
us say, " Here is the only incarnation within the 
realm of evidence, and here the quality of the being 
is such that reason may forgive us and faith com- 
mend us if we say, Truly this was the Son of God." 
If God were destined ever to draw near the 
human sense, the best shape of that earthly residence 
would be such as our Christ. What more impressive 
Son of God need we await than He of the manger 
and cross ? Do we seek diviner words, or a diviner 
love or holier life ? Let the superhuman come to us 
again and again, to attach itself to these years of 
humility and sorrow, and the being that should carry 
about this mingled soul and mind would always be 
a Jesus Christ. Heaven and earth meeting could 
not but give us the Man of Sorrows and sympathy. 
The upper purity and the lower sin, meeting, could 
not but give us the cross. Such upper life wedding 
the shores of death could not but give us the resur- 
rection. 



THE SUKROTJXDrXGS OF OHEIST. 



SERMON II. 
THE SURROUNDINGS OF CHRIST. 



"And when they saw the star they rejoiced with exceeding 
great joy." — Matthew 2 : 10. 

~T~ ET us resume to-day our reflections over Him 
-*-^ called the Christ. Let us recall some of the 
political, and moral, and religious, and literary scenes 
that lay outspread before the new King. 

The first fact I mention is both political and lit- 
erary. When Jesus entered upon His ministry there 
was a fact very favorable to the introduction of any 
new form of truth. The great prerequisite in the 
matter of thought and the dissemination of thought 
is the existence of a powerful language. It is the 
instrument by which great souls can break forth 
from their own imprisonment and visit the souls of 
mankind. Language is the chariot in which the 
soul visits its friends. Many a great mind has lived 
and died in chains because its ancestors had not 
wrought out for it, and, dying, willed to it, a wide- 



32 THE SURROUNDINGS OF CHRIST. 

reaching tongue that could at once stimulate the 
brain and stand ready to catch and express its life. 
Words are the embalmed ideas of the long yesterday. 
Each separate word is a truth. When, therefore, a 
genius like old Job is born into the world, and finds 
about him only the narrow Hebrew tongue, he enters 
upon a long imprisonment, unconscious, indeed, but 
real. He can utter some sublime things, but his 
mind is limited, like the soul of the Swiss child born 
only among mountains. When a genius like Gothe 
or Webster is born into such a universe of words as 
is seen in the German or English, it is the soul's 
own fault or sin if it does not move out freely and 
grandly toward the waiting human race. It is said 
of Dante that he was compelled to make the Italian 
language while he made his song ; that he was com- 
pelled to ransack all the domain of Italian thought 
in order to find words and inflections which he 
might dare use and that could be woven into poetic 
melody. It is beautifully said that before he could 
sing his music he was compelled first to make a 
harp. What a wonderful inheritance, then, must 
belong to each young mind in this country, who at 
birth falls heir to one of the three great tongues, 
French, English, or German, capable of expressing all 
the happy and sad feelings, the great and useful 



THE SURROUNDINGS OF CHRIST. 33 

thoughts of a human life. The study of the English 
language alone, the mastery of all its words, would 
be a grand education in itself, for each word stands 
for a fact in the discoveries, or pursuits, or deeds, or 
feelings of society. 

Through all of the thousand years before the 
opening of our era, the most intellectual race that 
has perhaps ever lived had built up the Greek lan- 
guage. As the coral rocks arose in the Southern 
ocean from great depths up to the sunlight, so the 
Greek language, from depths unknown, unsounded, 
arose until it came to the great upper sunlight of the 
poets and orators. Of all the marvels of history the 
Greek nation is the most wonderful. The seven 
wonders of the world are insignificant compared with 
that nation that occupied the little peninsula. Some- 
thing great was poured into the Greek soul when it 
came from its Creator. It did nothing upon any 
humble scale. Its first song by Homer will equal 
all the songs that will follow it. A nation so many- 
sided, and so wonderful upon each side, came never 
before nor elsewhere : wonderful in politics, in phi- 
losophy, in poetry, in art, in heroism, and in physical 
beauty and development. All this greatness was 
treasured up in language, the image, as one of the 

Greeks said, of the soul. 
3 



34 THE SURROUNDINGS OF CHRIST. 

Now the Roman Empire came in by its arms and 
ambition, and gave this language to all the Mediter- 
ranean world. Along with its companion, the Latin — 
a companion who was only a pleasant comrade rather 
than an equal or a rival — this Athenian tongue that 
opened the stores of poetry, and law, and philosophy 
to mankind, was given at once to all the civilized 
states of that period. The City of Rome itself enjoyed 
a population of 700,000, and the Roman Empire was 
administering its government to one hundred millions 
of people. Rome was equivalent to three republics 
like our own America. Over such a nation, so great, 
peace had been falling like a gracious sunshine for 
almost a half century. But that era of peace had 
been one of vice and all sensualism, and hence had 
developed a new human want, the want of a pure 
and adequate religion. The political state of things 
may be summed up in a few words : A large em- 
pire, a comparatively just government, a wonderful 
liberty of thought, and profound peace. 

It is not my purpose to seek to-day only the 
favorable facts and make out by force the readiness 
of the world for Christ. It is my wish to recall, 
simply, facts, leaving to you to weigh the bearing 
and quality of the facts. 

Having alluded to the political surroundings of 



THE SURROUNDINGS OF CHRIST. 35 



Jesus, let us pass to the literary condition of that 
classic empire. This theme has already been touched 
upon as to the presence and greatness of language. 
There remain other sides of this literary spectacle 
to be viewed. Christ came just after the literary 
glory of the old world had passed away. Language 
can not die suddenly, but great voices speaking in a 
golden tongue may very soon become silent. The 
Italian tongue remains, but there is no Dante, no 
Tasso, no Angelo, to speak in its accents. So when 
Christ appeared, the sun of Roman and of Greek 
literature had just set. Were we going to make an 
argument after the common fashion to show that the 
Advent came just when the world was most ready 
for it, we should pass by in silence the fact that the 
great Roman race had for a half hundred years been 
declining when the star arose in the East. Accord- 
ing to human ideas the Advent came a generation 
too late. But when it comes to measuring the 
times and plans of God, man may well hasten to 
confess God to be utterly measureless, His ways 
above our ways, His thoughts above our thoughts. 
Dismissing the idea of justifying or condemning 
Providence, I re-state the fact that our Lord saw 
fit to throw the light of His advent down upon a 
world which was rapidly retreating into the shadows 



36 THE SURROUNDINGS OF CHRIST. 

of a long light. The " golden age " of Augustus 
ended before the Son of Man appeared. Streaks of 
the sunset were still upon the sky, but the great 
day of literature had passed, and night was coming 
rapidly over the most impressive country and nation 
which the world ever saw. Only for a moment 
recall those names so familiar to us all, and as loved 
as familiar. Julius Caesar, the writer and the orator, 
had been slain forty-four years before our era began. 
Cicero was murdered a few years after the great 
Caesar fell. Virgil died nineteen years before Christ 
came. Horace was in his grave forty years before 
Christ began to teach mankind. Sallust had been 
dead thirty-four years before the Child was born in 
the manger. Christ was only eighteen years old, 
was still an unknown carpenter, when Livy died. 
Publius Syrius, Catullus, Terence, all, all these 
gifted children of philosophy and song had gone to 
sleep long before the music of Bethlehem came to 
the ear of the shepherds. Except Tacitus and Pliny, 
no great name ever crossed over the line that 
divided the pagan and Christian periods. Not a 
single great orator or artist, poet or statesman, was 
remaining upon the Roman or Greek world when 
our Lord appeared. It is not within the scope of 
human reason or analysis to affirm whether this 



THE SURROUNDINGS OF CHRIST. 37 

condition of literature was favorable or averse to 
the triumph of Christ. The plan of the universe is 
so large, and its outcome and the forces that toil at 
the outcome are so hidden that man can dogmatize 
about it only in moments of arrogance. In moments 
of soberness he must bow in silence and wait for 
the slow logic of events. If it were lawful for us 
to indulge in inquiry or conjecture, we should, 
perhaps, express the feeling that Christianity desired 
the field to be vacated by the poets and orators and 
statesmen of the long antiquity, that the human 
mind might be led along the new path of morals 
and all spirituality. Who knows but that Cicero, 
and Virgil, and Livy, and all that long line of great 
ones were suffered to pass away that the St. Pauls 
and St. Johns might appear, bringing the seeds 
of a new civilization in their hands? Permitting 
each one to interpret the facts, let us observe this, 
that there remained for the use of the new religion 
two unrivaled languages, a vast multitude of people, 
and a people awakened to mental life by the 
centuries that had passed away, a people united by 
law and a people at peace. 

Having marked the political and literary aspect 
of those times, let us allude to the moral condition 
of the people. History will fully justify the asser- 



38 THE SURROUNDINGS OF CHRIST. 

tion that the moral condition of the world was 
most wretched when Christ came with His Gospel 
of purity. From the great questions of the rights 
of man to the questions of individual purity, the 
scene was dark and the darkness was growing more 
dense. The recent civil wars had left society in a 
state of peculiar crime, so that to the usual wicked- 
ness of the age there was added a special disregard 
for life or any rights of man. The assassin lurked 
in every shadow ; the poisoner in every prominent 
family ; the traitor in every council. The times 
were preparing for the carnival of crime and cruelty 
which culminated in the atrocities of Nero. From 
Herod and Herodias, even to the lofty Seneca, all 
the hands that had power seemed to drip in blood. 
Herod the Great murdered two of his own sons at 
the suggestion of interested parties ; murdered his 
own wife, Mariamne ; ordered the slaughter of the 
Bethlehem children ; and, when about to die, he 
ordered the execution of the nobles, that his own 
funeral might be accompanied by a wide-spread 
mourning. Josephus says, " Never since the world 
was made was there a time more fruitful of wicked- 
ness." In every age, however, one may find 
depraved individuals, and hence the real condition 
of the Roman Empire may be best learned by 



THE SURROUNDINGS OF CHRIST. 39 

calling as witnesses, not its lowest individuals, but its 
highest. Take, therefore, Seneca, the lofty moralist 
whom many have mentioned upon the same page 
with the Christ. Seneca was to the Roman Empire 
what George Fox was to England, or what Franklin 
was to the colonies. Seneca taught the highest 
precepts of his day, and because he was such a 
moralist he was appointed tutor of the young Nero. 
The pupil betrayed the weakness of his guide. 
When Nero came to power his guardian, Seneca, 
became the low flatterer of the king, and smiled at 
all the royal vices. He even went further, and 
suggested to Nero the murder of a younger brother; 
and when Nero murdered his mother, Seneca wrote 
a letter to sanction and explain the crime. Add to 
these enormities the fact that Seneca had himself 
been banished for a crime that did not happen to 
please the powers over him, and you have a picture 
of Roman morals as seen even in the best of Roman 
men. Seneca himself confesses that he was a lover 
of virtue, but not virtuous; not a philosopher, but 
a student of philosophy. " I am occupied with the 
study of the vices, but all I require of myself is, 
not to be equal to the best, but only to be better 
than the bad." The story of Roman and Greek 
vice as incidentally given in " Plutarch's Morals," 



40 THE SURROUNDINGS OF CHRIST. 



and the " Annals of Tacitus," leaves the reader 
ready to confess that no age could have been 
humbler in these virtues that make up purity of 
home and private life. Under Nero, knights, sena- 
tors and ladies of the highest rank appeared upon 
the stage and sang low songs, such an assemblage 
as would not now be permitted in the basements of 
New York. Such, then, was the condition of morals 
when the Sermon upon the Mount began to be 
repeated by the Apostles in the classic world. It 
was time for the voice to come saying, "Blessed are 
the pure in heart." 

Our last inquiry was to be as to the religious 
phenomena that lay around the feet of the new Lord. 
As I stated last Sunday, there was no valuable reli- 
gious faith, no faith universal enough, and pure 
enough, and firm enough, to be of any value to the 
soul. The conception of God had been frittered 
away in the long attempt to make gods of the 
Caesars. You may imagine the state of the religious 
sentiment when Herod desired the people to declare 
him a deity. One of the kings of the time declared 
his dead wife a divinity, and ordered the empire to 
worship her, and he encircled his own head with 
steel points or rays, that when the light flashed upon 
them he might seem to wear the halo of the Deity. 



THE SURROUNDINGS OF CHRIST. 41 

It was in this era the simple people concluded that 
Paul and Barnabas were deities just from heaven, 
and hence along came the crowd with oxen and gar- 
lands for a sacrifice to the new candidates for 
homage. 

Such, briefly, was the political, the literary, the 
moral, and the religious surroundings of the world's 
Christ. Into such an empire did the Son of Man 
come. There was a vast state, that represented the 
world, to be reformed: there was a marvelous lan- 
guage to be the vehicle of the new truth; there was 
a decay of the Roman religious faith: there was a 
decadence of political and aesthetic forms of thought; 
there was a mental vitality remaining for new guid- 
ance ; there was a condition of morals that demanded 
the Sermon on the Mount; there was a dark night 
setting in that appealed loudly for the mercy of 
Heaven. Two nations, the greatest that had yet 
come from the mind of man — the Greek that dazzles 
the world yet with the memory of its poetry and 
art, and philosophy and oratory ; the Roman with its 
law, and military skill, and ambition, and with its 
unrivaled temples and palaces — had been merged 
into one, and with all their combined riches of mind 
and soul were descending to ruin together. One 
hundred millions of the best human beings of earth 



42 THE SURROUNDINGS OF CHRIST. 



had been deserted by all their great kings that had 
once ruled over them in love and wisdom ; had been 
deserted by the orators that had once instructed the 
multitude in the theater and the forum ; had been 
deserted by the poets who had sung the sweetest 
songs in the sweetest languages; had been deserted 
by the artists who had once wrought upon canvas 
and in marble ; had been deserted by the " grand old 
Romans" who would do nothing dishonorable. The 
grave had recalled all the throng of great and gifted 
souls, and the cradle offered no more inspired chil- 
dren to fill the widening void. 

Before that Mediterranean world lay the gloom 
of night — a night of vice, of ignorance, of sorrow. 
It was then that Christ arose. His star appeared in 
the East and men went to worship Him. Mark, 
therefore, that Christ thus became a turning point in 
history. The old was dying. The new breathed in 
Him its first breath of life. Oh, what an immense 
work was to be done to carry that classic world 
across from paganism to a spiritual religion ! If you 
will go to India or China now, and note what little 
power the European possesses to turn those old relig- 
ions and customs along Christian channels, you will 
form some idea of what a work lay before Christ 
and His Apostles when they stood upon the confines 



THE SURROUNDINGS OF CHRIST. 43 

of the Roman empire. The work would have para- 
lyzed any heart less divine than that of the Son of 
God. Looking out upon the scene, he said, " The 
harvest is indeed vast, but the laborers are few," 
and yet, rising to the height of prophecy, He said, 
through his servant, " Every knee shall bow and 
every tongue confess." 

The Roman religion crumbled rapidly. Porphyry, 
who wrote almost a score of books to stay the pro- 
gress of Christianity, complained bitterly that under 
the sound of the Gospel the old gods had become 
dumb. This lament of a disappointed pagan, Milton 
elaborated into verse : 

The oracles are dumb; 

Nor voice nor hideous hum, 
Euns through the arched roof in words deceiving. 

Apollo from his shrine 

No longer can divine. 
With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving 

No trance or breathed spell 
Inspire the pale-eyed priest from his prophetic cell. 

The lonely mountains o'er 

And the resounding shore, 
A voice of weeping heard, and loud lament; 

From haunted spring and dale, 

Edged with poplar pale, 
The parting Genius is with sighing sent; 

With flower-inwoven tresses torn, 
The . nymphs in 'twilight shade of tangled thicket mourn. 



44 THE SURROUNDINGS OF CHRIST. 

But not at once is a religious world to be 
reformed. The works of religion, as indeed all the 
works of human progress, reach out like the forma- 
tion of the glaciers or the deltas, over long periods. 
It saddens the human heart and baffles the intellect 
to think of the slowness of God's mercy toward His 
children. The Psalmist anticipated the world's sor- 
row, when he said : " How long ! Oh, Lord ! wilt 
thou hide thyself forever ?" But complaints are 
vain. A thousand years are as a day with the great 
Hand that made and moves the universe. 

Christ and His Apostles, first twelve and then 
seventy, began their mission in the world. The 
pagan multitude could no more realize the meaning 
of a spiritual religion than the African of the Niger 
can discern the meaning of Bacon's philosophy, or 
the beauty of the fine arts. Hence, the Roman 
Empire under the first Christian kings, and under 
all the popes, combined in various quantities the 
superstition of the past and the Christianity of the 
future. Plato and Christ were combined. The 
incense of Jupiter's altar was burnt before the cross, 
and the deified heroes of the former age were 
excluded by the deified Mary and the deified saints 
of the latter. That pageantry which once filled the 
streets around the temple of Jupiter or the pantheon 



THE SURROUNDINGS OF CHRIST. 45 

could not die at once : it languished along to repeat 
itself in the temples of Christian saints, in presence 
of a half-redeemed, half-pagan throng. 

Slowly, indeed, comes the redemption of the 
human race, but, notwithstanding this painful halt- 
ing, looking back we behold Christ to be a turning 
point in the history of our earth. He was the 
revelation of a new God ; the One who proves to 
be the true God, the only Lord and Father of us 
all. He was the revelation of a morals that makes 
the sages of old hang their heads in humility. He 
did not, like Seneca, teach virtue without being 
virtuous, nor was he content by being worse than 
the best, but better than the worst. All compro- 
mising, all comparative goodness, terminated at 
Nazareth. A sinful thought became a stain upon the 
soul, and the enmity that said, "Thou fool," became 
a confessed ruin or sorrow in that heart. 

At the touch of this new Saviour the principles 
of law underwent great change, and slowly passed 
from darkness to light. Christ was especially a 
great crisis in the history of the soul. The body 
became the casket, the soul the gem. The soul 
being thus thrown forward, its home had to be 
enlarged, and its career extended. The home 
became enlarged into Heaven, and its career into 



46 THE SURROUNDINGS OF CHRIST. 

immortality. The current of thought, and love, 
and hope, having been thus changed, as a river 
that strikes a wall of adamant is hurled back, it 
gathers volume and velocity as it runs. It receives 
other streams into its bosom. Every century widens 
and deepens this river. Defective as the Church 
still is, it is wise and powerful compared with what 
it was when Augustine was its theologian, or Leo X. 
was its pope. Grandly it moves away from material 
symbols and dead forms toward spirituality, and 
from the study of the divine records brings forth 
each generation a better conception of God. As 
our earth in a long period moved from chaos to its 
present harmony of water and field and sky, sunlight 
and starlight, as its chief occupant man moved out 
from his first home until he filled the continents and 
its islands with his presence, his acts, his labor and 
his love ; so Christianity, having entered the world 
by the gateway called Christ, has widened, and is 
widening, in power and beauty, contemplating no 
result less than the loving conquest of a world, and 
the transfer of its millions at last to the happy fields 
of Heaven. 



IKFLUE^OE OF CHRIST 0~S LETTEES 

AJSD AET. 



SERMON III. 

INFLUENCE OF CHRIST ON LETTERS 

AND ART. 



"Ye shall know them b}^ their fruits." — Matt. 7: 16. 

TT is my desire to continue, this morning, thoughts 
-^ about Christ. To-day let us briefly observe His 
influence upon letters and art. The history of man 
is the history of influences. He was not made 
great by the Creator, but was made small in all 
directions, mental and moral, and then was subjected 
to a long line of influences. The Bible account of 
man represents him as only a large child. He had 
not learned to distinguish between the voice of God 
in one part of the garden, and the voice of Satan 
in another part ; nor did he know which one of 
those contending parties would exert the better 
influence over his existence. Giving the matter a 
hasty survey, he finally concluded that the serpent 
in the tree knew more about the possibilities and 
successes of the garden than was known by the 



50 INFLUENCE OF CHRIST 

other potentate called Jehovah. Hence, the first 
man hastened to cast his lot into the general lot of 
the evil one. Thus, as a piece of clay is taken up 
by the potter, and is shaped by his hand, his foot 
meanwhile turning the rapid wheel, so man was 
cast upon the arena of action, a piece of flexible 
soul, and upon him many hands began to press, and 
many feet began to turn the wheel. When the 
potter's clay first falls upon the board it is only a 
lump ; an hour afterward it is seen standing forth 
an elegant vase, with lines the most graceful con- 
ceivable in human taste. So man set forth in life 
only a lump of mind; the subsequent years point 
out to us a noble Greek or German or Englishman. 
To bring about such results, the wheel has been 
turned a long while, and the molding hand has 
for centuries pressed heavily and lightly bj r times. 
War and peace, climate, the presence of great 
individuals, the longings of the soul, self-interest, 
vanity, ambition, the love of money, the love of 
man, and the love of God have all entered into the 
great pottery, and have given the shape and then 
changed the shape of all the clay children that have 
come and gone on the world-stage. So pliant have 
the body and soul been, so dependent have they 
appeared upon the external touch of climate, food, 



ON LETTERS AND ART. 51 

law, and all association, that some have concluded 
that there may be a science of history, and that 
some day a philosopher may sit down and compose 
a future history of his country, using as data the 
causes that are at work, making his history out of 
the inevitable results. The theory is confessed to 
be good, but it is objected that the time will never 
come when any one can count, or in any manner 
detect, the agencies that exist or shall spring up in 
a wide world. Unexpected famines or earthquakes, 
or wars, or conflagrations will come and change a 
nation's drift. Or a single individual like a Luther, 
or a Savonarola, or a Dollinger, or a Napoleon, will 
come along, and by himself alone change the page 
of history for a hundred or five hundred years. 
Goldwin Smith says beautifully that the scientific 
minds will always be able to analyze the sunlight 
and to explain the formation of clouds, but they 
will never be able to paint a sunset in advance, 
and tell us how the clouds will marshal them- 
selves, or from what urns the colors will be poured 
out. 

Let us then content ourselves with the remark, 
that all we children of earth are here for a few 
years to be molded for good or ill, molded by 
agencies known and unknown, till at last we shall 



52 INFLUENCE OF CHRIST 

all pass into eternity in the shape received here on 
this rapid wheel. 

It is my wish in this and other sermons to ask 
you to observe the action of Christ upon the 
centuries, to mark how that hand has helped to 
shape the thinking and loving clay called man. To 
observe all the fruits of Christianity would consume 
all the Sundays of the year, but to gather specimen 
fruits from the bending tree is the easy and useful 
task of a few brief discourses. 

Let us not be guilty of the rashness that ascribes 
all the good of earth to the Christian philosophy. 
There are those who, in a zeal without knowledge, 
will declare all our arts and sciences, our compass, 
telegraph, and steam-engine, to have come to the 
world through the evangelical religion. But all 
such generalities damage the cause they are designed 
to support. The youth drilled in this kind of 
declamation subsequently find that the Greek and 
Roman worlds were wonderful in science, art, 
literature, law, and inventions before our era began; 
that they had grand things which we boastful ones 
of the nineteenth century can not equal. Four 
thousand years before Christ came, God, the Father, 
declared the world to be " very good," and, having 
such a Creator, the goodness poured into man at his 



ON LETTERS AXD ABT. 53 

creation burst forth from the soul all along from 
Adam to Socrates. As the lilies bloomed before the 
Saviour pointed out that group of blossoms to His 
followers, so the mind and soul of man began to 
bloom in the old world where Hiram worked in 
gold, where Miriam sang, where Job and David 
wrote, where the Greek orators thundered and the 
Greek poets sang. It is safe to say that the great- 
ness of earth began, not with Christ, but with God. 
We need not take the garlands from the Father to 
bestow them upon the Son. The grandeur of earth 
began when God said, "Let us make man in our 
image.'' Let us never set up such rash claims for 
Christianity that when our youth pass from child- 
hood to manhood and womanhood, and begin to read 
books, they will need to remodel their opinions and 
unlearn the lessons of early life, and thus run the 
peril of falling from a once childlike faith into the 
dreary land of infidelity or doubt. To view the 
world as having all come from an infinite God, and 
hence as having bloomed and blossomed always as 
God's flowers bloom along the lonely Amazon, and 
as His ocean ripples in smiles always, before the 
Christian classified any flowers or sailed any ships, 
and then to behold Christ as having been sent to 
urge the ,world more rapidly forward along the path 



54 INFLUENCE OF GHBIST 

of greatness, seems the better line of thought; a 
path most free from pitfalls, and lying under the 
sweetest, purest light. The world of God was good, 
the world of Christ only better. 

The first great fruit of the Christian tree is cer- 
tainly the better path of salvation it brought. It 
brought no wholly new method; but it perfected 
the ideas that lay only in outline. The idea of sac- 
rifice can never go beyond the death of Christ. 
After God came with His Lamb there was no more 
need of the flocks and herds of a thousand hills. 
And after Christ taught His ethics there was room 
for nothing more ; His hope, His penitence, His 
virtue, His love, were all the zenith of those moral 
heights. 

Let us pass by these fruits and go to fields less 
familiar to all our thoughts. It is a great injustice 
to Christianity if one views it only as being an 
escape from hell hereafter to a heaven also beyond. 
The real truth is, Christ has blended himself with all 
the annals of Christian lands, and has given new 
color to all the days of the great era that wears His 
name. As the setting sun shining through a watery 
air makes all things — fence, hut, log, forest, and field 
—to be gold like himself, so Christ blends with the 
rich and the humble details of society, and sheds 



* 



ON LETTERS AND ART. 55 

His heavenly blush upon the great pageant of human- 
ity marching beneath. If we dare not say Christianity 
invented the steamboat and the railroad, we may say 
that it reshaped literature and all the arts, and has 
deeply affected law and the whole moral aspect of 
civilization There is an art which Christianity 
created almost wholly, asking little of outside aid. 
Music is that peculiar child. The long-continued 
vision of heaven, the struggle of the tones of voice 
and of instrument to find something worthy of the 
deep feelings of religion, resulted at last in those 
mighty chants that formed the mountain springs of 
our musical Nile. There could have been no music 
had not depth of feeling come to man. The men 
who went up, to the pagan temples went with no 
such love, with no sorrow of penitence, with no 
exultant joy. It was necessary for Jesus Christ to 
come along and transfer religion from the form to 
the spirit, and from an "airy nothingness" to a love 
stronger than life, before hymns like those of Luther, 
and Wesley, and Watts, could break from the heart. 
The doctrine of repentance must live in the world a 
while before we can have a " Miserere," and the 
exultant hope of the Christian must come before the 
mind can invent a " Gloria." As no religion but 
that of Jesus could have given us a penitent Magda- 



56 INFLUENCE OF CUBIST 

len, so no other creed could have wrought out for 
us a "Lord be merciful," or a " Nearer, my God, to 
Thee." An art is the effort of a cultured soul to 
express itself. When the soul has developed into a 
love of mountain or field, then it invents the paint- 
er's art that it may tell to others and to itself its 
wondrous feeling. When the soul has developed a 
love of form, it invents the sculptor's art, that its 
love may become incarnate and be held on imperish- 
able marble. Thus each art is the outbreaking of a 
gifted soul. But there must be something within 
that will burst the prison walls and make this beau- 
tiful escape. The religion of Jesus Christ placed in 
the human heart those ideas and feelings which at 
last burst forth into the sublime and plaintive music. 
There could be no music until the soul had become 
full. Therefore, when John drew his picture of 
Heaven, when Magdalen shed her tears, when Christ 
died on the cross, when the Christian martyrs began 
to die for their faith, when Paul astonished the 
word with his self-denial and heroism, when the relig- 
ion of Jesus began to picture the immortality of 
man, then the foundation of music began to be laid, 
wide, and massive, and deep. Thus you may glance 
over all the arts and find that the great ideas and 
emotions of the new religion affected them all — the 



ON LETTERS AND ART. 57 

paintings of Raphael and Angelo, and the architecture 
of all the great middle centuries, great in the con- 
struction of temples. Christianity helped to make 
Angelo and Raphael by furnishing them with grand 
themes. As no lips can be eloquent unless they are 
speaking in the name of a great truth, so no painter 
can paint unless some one brings him a great subject. 
Heaven and hell made the poet Dante. Christianity 
made Beatrice. Paradise made John Milton. The 
mother of our Lord and the last judgment made 
Angelo. It is the great theme that makes the 
orator, the painter, the poet. The great theme lifts 
up the soul and makes it the revealer of a new 
world. Great minds were sleeping in every age in 
some cradle in city and village, or lonely cottage, 
but they passed through manhood and on to the 
tomb unheard, because no great theme had come 
along to wake them into a broad, infinite life. What 
Gray wrote in his elegy possesses as much of phil- 
osophic truth as of poetic sweetness: 

Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid 

Some heart once pregnant with celestial tire; 

Hands that the rod of empire might have swayed 

Or waked to ecstacy the living lyre. 

* * * * 

Their lot forbade: nor circumscribed alone 
Their growing virtues but their crimes confined, 



58 INFLUENCE OF CHRIST 

Forbade to wade through slaughter to a throne, 
And shut the gates of mercy on mankind. 
* * * * 

Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife, 
Their sober wishes never learned to stray; 

Along the cool sequestered vale of life 

They kept the noiseless tenor of their way. 

Gray's elegy points out, not the beauty of man, 
but one of his lesser sorrows, a calamity sweet in its 
pensiveness. 

There is truth rich and touching in those lines, 
but this truth that for the hour lent such softness 
to the poet's heart, and which has made immortal 
the churchyard where "the curfew tolled the knell 
of parting day," points out also a solemn fact in the 
history of man, namely, that if the soul is born into 
an era when no great ideas are passing along — ideas 
of liberty, or religion, or art — that soul is doomed to 
the life of only a child, and to die without ever 
having felt any powerful or divine throbbing of the 
spirit. Into such a world it was the province and 
glory of Christ to come, bringing with him the 
theme of a great human life. Children of genius 
coming up from the cradle did not find a realm in 
which " along the cool sequestered vale of life '' 
they must keep " the noiseless tenor of their way," 
but they stepped forth into a land all glorified by 



ON LETTERS AND ART. 59 

the ideas and passions of the Christian religion. 
You all know that Tennyson could not have written 
his "In Memoriam " had he lived in the days of 
Homer or Virgil. Then he would have followed the 
flag of the Ajaxes and the Achilles, and have told 
us how the body of Hector was dragged around the 
streets behind the chariot of a savage conqueror. 
But Christ carried the modern poet away from the 
dust-cloud of battle and made him sing a loftier 
song. Great as Homer is, his poetry has only the 
attractiveness of ambition and of the emblazonry of 
arms, of the marshaling of troops on a battle-field, 
and the whole pomp and circumstance of war. 
Great as Homer was, he could not have written one 
verse of the " In Memoriam," in all his gifted life. 
The Christ had not yet come to empty the urns of 
love, and purity, and immortality, into the human 
heart. 

No military poems have been composed since the 
coming of Jesus Christ. Before His day the most 
gifted brains busied their muse with the battles of 
Agamemnon, Achilles, and iEneas. But when after 
Christ the highest forms of literature began to come 
back to the world, the battle-cry, the mad career of 
ambition, the rolling chariot, the cloud of arrows, had 
disappeared from poetry, because under the banner 



60 INFLUENCE OF CHRIST 

of Christ the Alexanders, and Caesars, and Neros, 
and Napoleons, had been at once assigned a lower 
seat, and the poet, wishing to write for the new 
world, had to turn from the fields of battle to the 
fields of the soul. Even the war psalms of David 
have been silenced by the Christian religion. Things 
once so noble became only events of calamity and 
regret. We esteem Washington, and Wellington, 
and Grant, to have been brave, but our great poets 
dreamed not of building poems out of these bloody 
names, because war is no longer the brilliant destiny 
of man as it was in the classic era, but it is the 
calamity of time, the misfortune of a half-savage 
race. Christ has carried our poets away from the 
old themes, and has asked them to look at all life 
here and hereafter. He has recalled the God of 
battles, and has placed the God of love upon the 
empty throne. 

One of the members of the bench of this city 
has just published an address in which the learned 
and sincere thinker combats the idea that Christ 
arose from the dead on the third day, as alleged by 
the Gospels. There is quite a large number of per- 
sons in the world w T ho join in this belief or doubt. 
But even over these isolated hearts that can not see 
the body of Christ rising from the tomb of rock, 



ON LETTERS AND ART. 61 

Christ does yet shed a light of immortality, for in 
the perfection and marvel of His character they see 
a destiny of the soul that reaches beyond earth. 
Hence when some one misunderstood the argument 
of Judge Booth, and accused him of denying the 
future life of the soul, he comes forward and says 
he should be very unwilling to deny or doubt the 
future life of man. Thus while the judge denies 
the exceptional raising of Christ, he casts himself 
fully upon the future life of the soul, of Christ, and 
of all souls. Thus Christ shapes even the literature 
of doubt. Thus there is blowing all over the intel- 
lectual world, in its most logical hours even, a wind 
of paradise that fans all the temples that throb with 
being. That this universal hope comes from the 
matchless character of Christ, more than from all 
other sources combined, I have not a shadow of 
doubt. All the ideas and emotions we carry in our 
hearts have come to us from fountains dripping far 
away from ourselves. So invisible are these foun- 
tains, so unconscious are our spirits of being fed by 
any such springs, that we pass along through life 
often as though we were independent thinkers, and 
were elaborating all our ideas out of our own minds, 
as the sun hurls forth light out of its own bosom. 
But there is little truth in such consciousness. Out- 



62 INFLUENCE OF GHBIST 

side of us there is some great potency shaping our 
thoughts and emotions, as the sunlight colors the 
woods, and while here and there a mind is standing 
denying the literal, immediate resurrection of Christ's 
body, over that very soul hover the character, the 
teachings, the vision of the same Jesus, making the 
skeptical mind willing indeed to believe that earth 
is but the border of a paradise. Thus while a 
learned judge is battling against a specific shape of 
the resurrection, or a specific time and place of it, 
on the one hand, on another hand the same rejected 
Christ is filling the same acute mind with a blessed 
vision of a heaven beyond earth. The painter may 
toil over a landscape without knowing that Chris- 
tianity has withdrawn the low, and the bloody, and 
the cruel, from his art ; the sculptor may carve at a 
Madonna or an ideal forehead without being con- 
scious that Christianity has forbidden him to carve 
a Jupiter or a Laocoon, and so Whittier and Bryant 
may write without feeling the heavy hand that 
forbids them to celebrate the glory of the bloody 
field. Just thus a doubting mind like Judge Booth 
may even write against Christ without knowing that 
all the dream and hope of life, lying like white lilies 
in that embattling soul, were planted chiefly by that 
lofty Nazarene. The love of Christ gives to those 



ON LETTERS AND ART. 63 



even who deny the resurrection of his body a firm 
hope of immortal life. 

Far be it from me to claim too much for the 
Christian religion. I am ready to throw aside any 
proposition that must be sustained by loud assump- 
tion or by pious fraud. There is nothing valuable 
in this world but the truth. The vision of St. 
John says the gates of Heaven were shut against 
" whosoever loveth and maketh a lie." Against all 
untrue things, against all unfair arguments, the gates 
of earth also should be closed, for there is nothing 
at last valuable but the good, the beautiful, and the 
true. With this principle fully in memory I claim 
that Jesus Christ has entered deeply into all the 
lines of emotion and intellect that now so adorn our 
century. You Christians meet to-day to commune 
with Him ! It is well. But He communed with 
your country and your literature and your arts long 
before you came upon the scene of action. He 
began to shine into the human heart long ago and 
re-shape it. He fashioned the holy hymns which our 
fathers sang. He stood by when the Catholics 
created the Gregorian chant, and where the Cove- 
nanters sang their psalms in the wilderness. He 
invaded the realm of poetic thought, and turned 
divine genius away from the adulation of bloody 



64 INFLUENCE OF CHRIST ON LETTERS AND ART. 

generals to the study of nature and its Creator, the 
soul and its destiny. He has communed with all 
the centuries since His Advent, and has penetrated 
them with a purer, loftier spirit. Mother and child 
have knelt in prayer by His example and request ; 
the mightiest intellects have shaped their philosophy 
in the light of Christ, and the old and the dying 
have tried to go away from earth with some of this 
Saviour's words upon their trembling, blanching lips. 



IOTLUEKOE OF CHRIST ON THE 
HUMM SPIRIT. 



SERMON IV. 

INFLUENCE OE CHRIST ON THE HUMAN 

SPIRIT. 



" Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of." — Luke 9:55. 

npHE Disciples, indignant that a certain Samaritan 
-*- village would not receive their Master, asked 
permission and power to rain down fire upon the 
unbelieving nation. Christ refused their request, 
and informed them that they were disgracing their 
own souls by uttering or cherishing such a wish. 
They were ignorant of the unworthiness of the 
nature that could exult in such a rain-storm of fire. 
In the mind of Christ there lay a different ideal of 
man's duty and pleasure. In our task of viewing 
the results of the life of Christ let us come, to-day, 
to what may be called The Influence of Christ 
upon Man's Spirit. 

By common usage the word "spirit" is used to 
designate something different from the mind, and 
something different from the soul. Inasmuch as the 



68 INFLUENCE OF CHRIST 

mental world is invisible, and in all ways unknowable, 
except in the vaguest manner, the words that repre- 
sent what ideas exist in this department must them- 
selves remain vague, only shadows of other shadows. 
And yet the word spirit conveys to us an idea, 
indefinite though it be. When any one alludes to 
the career of the Prince of Orange, and says he 
revealed greatness of spirit, what a flight there is of 
small men and things from our listening heart, and 
what a rush into it of feelings of nobleness! When 
some orator declares our century to possess a broad, 
lofty spirit, we see in an instant a hundred years 
that would not soil their record with coliseums, or 
martyrdoms, or inquisitions, or ignorance, or witch- 
craft, or perpetual slavery. We know not the 
meaning of the word, and yet when it comes to us 
the heart turns about toward it, as the sunflower 
toward the sun. The words " spirit of man" convey 
to us the idea of a general drift of all the thoughts 
and feelings of the man. We say the father of 
waters runs southward. All its rivulets and tribu- 
taries point toward the south, and be they in the 
-farth north, or murmur they on the western side of 
the Alleghany mountains or the eastern slope of the 
Rocky range, they all murmur toward the noon-day 
sun, and sigh for the Mexican gulf over their pebbly 



ON THE HUMAN SPIRIT. 69 

and mossy beds. The spirit of man must mean the 
great drift or current of his life. If he is said to 
have a great spirit, it must be that all the days and 
hours of his life, rising in the hidden recesses of 
the soul, among the unseen hills of its adamant or 
jasper, at once set forth upon a long journey toward 
the noon of love and light, that infinite gulf, sweeter 
than Mexican sea, murmuring in hymn and benedic- 
tion as they flow. It is said that Fenelon revealed 
a lofty spirit. This is affirmed of Chalmers. The 
world says the same of Joan d' Arc. It thinks the 
same of L'Ouverture. Of such mighty souls the 
pages of history hold just enough to help us in the 
study of this word " spirit." As history marches 
along it will meet with more of these noble children, 
and when at last the Son of Man shall come in His 
final glory He wall find all the children of earth 
standing before Him happj^ in a greatness of spirit. 

Leaving the words before you in all their vague- 
ness, I will ask you to mark the influence of that 
one Nazarene upon the human spirit, the real, 
though slow, tendency of society to escape from 
the chains of the small and to fly to the freedom 
of greatness. 

1. These addresses must all begin with the 
assumption of man's primitive barbarism. No one 



70 INFLUENCE OF CHRIST 

will deny the assumption. The only remaining 
debate is over the question whether this barbarism 
began, as the Bible affirms, with Eden, or whether, 
with the rational scientists, it began millions of 
years back. All consent that man began humbly. 
Passing, then, from this thought, it is evident that 
man has risen only as rapidly as has arisen some 
ideal outside of himself. As fast as the intellect 
and soul of the world grew and stored away its 
growth in its literature, and its v great exploits and 
great men, so rapidly did the next generation come 
up and read the record and rise to the new shape 
of daily life. Adam and Eve fell because no gener- 
ations had gone before them to teach them by high 
written ideals nor by an impressive example. The 
shaping of life becomes easier the moment the 
outside world becomes full of guiding thought and 
guiding conduct. The best Persian king, Darius, 
suffered no bad conduct and not any wicked conver- 
sation to exist around his palace, because he said 
the atmosphere of royal children must be purer than 
the common atmosphere of those not born to rule. 
Thus all life assumes the color of its surroundings, 
and the Faustine who was a poor, weak queen in 
the palace of Aurelius, might have been a Mme. 
Guy on in the seventeenth century, or a Victoria in 



ON THE HUMAN SPIRIT. 71 

the nineteenth. But Faustine lived before woman 
had become great in her personal independence and 
virtue. She lived when woman was great only in 
beauty. 

Opening our era and looking into its spiritual 
secrets we behold Christ surpassing all other agencies 
in molding the great hours of the soul. The roar 
of trade and the carnival of vice, indeed, go forward, 
but so far as the multitude has good hours of reflec- 
tion and virtue, Christ stands largely responsible for 
these better moments of mankind. I do not speak 
now of that spiritual condition alone which we find 
in the confines of the Church. Beyond the Church, 
even, all through the length and breadth of society, 
there are plain indications that there is a lofty One 
— a great Son of Man — standing up in the world's 
sight — a source of new light and sentiment. Let 
me illustrate my meaning. One of the favorite ideas 
of the age is that of boundless human brotherhood. 
It glories in the fatherhood of God and the brother- 
hood of man. This latter lies at the basis of the 
new government that is creeping like a morning 
sunshine over the world. Haughty kings and queens 
have had to step down from their thrones. The 
man with a soul in him has become equal to the 
man with a scepter. The " Dairyman's Daughter," 



72 INFLUENCE OF C HEIST 

because of the heart in her bosom, is equal to Queen 
Bess, or Queen Ann, or Caroline, with a diadem on 
her forehead. When Christ lived His sublime life, 
and passed by the purple robes of a Pilate and a 
Herod, and loved such characters as John and Luke ; 
when He passed by those mighty in violence and 
gave His hand to those beautiful in soul, the world 
began to become a brotherhood of which the soul 
was to be the only essential element, the condition 
of full membership. All this crumbling of thrones 
which we behold in our day, this sinking of crowned 
heads to the level of the multitude, has not come 
without a cause. The thrones of earth were founded 
upon the deepest principles of selfishness. Millions 
of bayonets have stood in frightful lines for the 
king's support. The history of the last hundred 
years has been the history of attempts to keep up 
the same old despotisms. But the equality of man- 
kind has, at the close of each battle in which kings 
have triumphed, come back to begin its secret 
abrasion of the flinty rock. No sooner have the 
kings exacted peace than the voice of human broth- 
erhood has begun, like Abel's blood, to cry up from 
the ground ; and the kings, flushed on yesterday with 
victory, must begin at once to invent new arms and 
draft new mercenaries for a fiery conflict. In seek- 



ON THE BUM AN SPIRIT. 73 

ing the cause for such a change, come and coming, 
we must not rest in climate, or food, or race, or mere 
fickleness of taste, but must, if possible, find some 
powerful idea or sentiment invading the human 
mind. We feel free to affirm that no one influence 
can any where be pointed out that will equal the 
power that Christ has brought to bear upon the 
republican principles in society. The w T hole soul of 
His religion is broad. It is man — man, not rich or 
poor, not crowned, not chained, but man who figures 
in the great Christian drama of life and death. In 
the religion of Jesus the rich are humiliated if riches 
be their idol ; in the same religion the poor are 
exalted if they are in the paths of righteousness. 
Here it was the widow with two mites outranked 
the Dives of purple and fine linen. Here it was the 
first began to be last and the last first. Those whom 
birth, or riches, or force, had set up in high places, 
began to sit uneasy on their pedestals of vanity, and 
slowly up rose Magdalen and all the penitents till 
forehead of king and forehead of subject found the 
level of kindred drops. In this transformation scene 
of the New Testament, children came to the front, 
and, for the first time on man's world, were made 
the equals of kings, orators, or philosophers. Of such 
is the kingdom of heaven. 



74 INFLUENCE OF CHRIST 

Many fail to read the bearing of Jesus Christ 
because they look only at the sectarian agencies at 
work in the generations. They behold the caste in 
churches; the difference there>between the high and 
the low ; they perceive that most churches are built 
by the rich for the rich ; and in presence of such a 
spectacle they fail to mark the drift of the abstract 
Christ. But a church is often only something that 
conceals Christ, as language is often used to conceal 
thought. We confess the naturalness of the failure, 
the perfect logic of the inference. I am not pleading- 
to-day on behalf of any sectarian shape of Christian- 
ity. I ask you to get away from human infirmity 
and look only at Christ. Thus looking, you will see 
that He is a power leaping over sectarianism and 
church vanity, as waves leap over the play-houses of 
children on the sandy shore. In the face of the 
caste of church, His beautiful equality runs on and 
penetrates politics, and poetry, and philosophy. When 
Robert Burns wrote his little poem "A Man's a Man 
for a' That," he did not draw the inspiration from 
the Catholic or Calvinistic or Established Churches. 
Looking at them intently he would never have 
reached the idea that " hamely fare" and " hodden- 
gray" weighed nothing against the value of him that 
ate the "fare" and wore the "gray." Churches 



ON THE HUMAN SPIRIT. 75 

are places where the glory of Christ is blended with 
the depravity of man ; and is stained dreadfully in 
the blending. Above and beyond, and also through 
the churches, the spirit of Christ flies, like the angel 
that went to and fro over the heavens in St. John's 
vision. There is a spirit of brotherhood in Christ 
that even while the Church was holding slaves and 
was glorying in bondage, was upon the outside of the 
Church pleading for equality and liberty. When it 
could not touch the pulpit it touched a Wilberforce. 
When the communion table would not confess it, it 
spoke in music through Sumner and Stuart Mill. 
Jesus Christ has always been larger than any exist- 
ing sect, or all sects, and as the sun shines upon the 
earth, and besides pours his flood around it and 
beyond it, touching other planets and emptying 
oceans of light into the great formless void, so Christ 
has blessed the Church so far as it would receive 
His gifts, and then has poured His love around it 
and beyond it, where the statesmen have sat in 
council without any creed or any prayer. 

It was a great event in the history of the human 
spirit when the Christian religion came with only one 
rite for all, and for all only one condition of salva- 
tion. Be the forehead crowned with jewels, the bap- 
tism for it is the same as the baptism of the beggar. 



76 INFLUENCE OF CHRIST 

The brow white as the snow and the brow dark 
with toil in the sun receive the same sprinkling in 
the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy 
Ghost. And through the gates of salvation, all who 
pass in thereat pass by one name and by one faith. 
The great and the humble form only one company 
when Christ makes the human race pass before Him 
in grand review. And when the estimate of God is 
thus seen, the old human estimates all fail. As when 
the Ville de Havre was sinking, all human distinc- 
tions failed, and mistress was as servant, and scholar 
and sailor, the distinguished and the unknown, were 
all one because earth was disappearing, and eternity 
was pressing up against dying hearts, so in the world 
of religion men become all one because all the van- 
ities of earth fade on account of the great God 
coming, through Christ, into the world. 

When one of our generals (General Custar) was 
making a march, not long since, in the Rocky 
Mountain solitudes, one of his humblest soldiers, 
having become separated from the regiment, was 
found in a lonely ravine with the fatal arrows 
sticking in his breast. Comrades brought the body 
into camp. There it was discovered that so humble 
and obscure was the soldier that his real name was 
unknown. As he lay upon the ground, there was 



ON THE HUMAN SPIRIT. 77 

no one who could mention the name of any being 
that had ever loved him, or of the mother who had 
once pressed him an infant against her heart. But 
mark now the divine grandeur of religion. When 
the good general desired a simple service to be held, 
the Bible refused to utter any other words over the 
poor dead than those that are read at the burial of 
presidents and kings. The words, " I am the resur- 
rection and the life ; he that believeth in Me, 
though he were dead, yet shall he live ; and whoso- 
ever liveth and believeth in Me shall never die,'' 
are the only ones Christ will whisper over the tomb 
of man. The ritual of the Episcopal Church, of 
the Roman Church, of the Bible direct, in such an 
hour, uttered over that humble bocty the same 
words which Bossuet read when the mighty Conde 
passed from the splendor of France to the quiet 
tomb. The words that resounded over the beautiful 
daughter of Charles I., Henrietta, were read here in 
the lonely hills over a face that had no one to love 
it, and that revealed no beauty except the sublimity 
of death. 

Eighteen hundred years of this kind of assault 
against the vanity of man ; centuries of those 
heavenly whisperings about the greatness of the 
soul and the insignificance of all else; those centu- 



78 INFLUENCE OF CHRIST 

ries of warning to the lofty, and of consolation for 
the poor ; those centuries that baptized high and 
low in the same three-fold name ; those centuries in 
which the mighty and the weak have knelt and 
received the same communion in memory of one 
Lord — have silently made human hearts flow to- 
gether, and have made uprightness of life, the only 
jewel that can confer distinction upon man. When 
Christianity came along with its unfolding of 
Heaven ; when it placed our feet, not upon the 
borders of ambition, or riches, or fame, but upon 
the borders of eternity, it sunk the distinctions of 
society and set up new praises on the far off shore. 
I do not mean by this that there is no longer 
any individual vanity remaining upon earth. Would 
it were possible to announce this blessed condition 
of things this day. But it is not our privilege to 
exult over a redeemed earth. There remain in the 
world millions to whom a man is great in the purple 
and fine linen he wears, and in the servants that 
follow him, or in the dead creed that he shouts in 
public places. Thus Henry the Eighth moved about 
in a religious pomposity and with hands stained 
with innocent blood. We speak not of individuals, 
but of wide and deep influences, and seeking these, 
we declare that Christ has poured around the 



ON THE HUMAN SPIRIT. 79 

human spirit an atmosphere into which the thinking 
soul, passing, becomes full of humility and tender- 
ness. All its egotism and loud vanity fall off like 
rags when it passes from the scenes of men into 
this temple of the Man of Nazareth. There are 
millions of spirits that are growing lofty in this 
warm light of eternity 

If, now, you will follow out this begun inspection 
of the heart, you will find that not only is Christ 
pouring into the soul the great democratic idea that 
is blooming now into new and beautiful rights of 
man, but that Christ has waked in the bosom a 
group of other feelings scarcely visible when the 
world was young. Religion has passed from the 
terrible to the joyous, from the horrid to the beauti- 
ful. The heathen tortures himself with knives ; the 
Christian of our day sings words* and music, the 
sweetest that the two arts can produce. The 
Chinese and all the pagans kill at times innocent 
little ones as an act of worship ; the Christian 
mother clasps her infant to her bosom and whispers 
prayers over it, mingling prayers and tears. The 
heathen philosopher doubted and steeled his heart 
to his fate ; the Christian philosopher beholds 
the city that hath foundations, and walks calmly 
down life's decline. At no time in the world's 



80 INFLUENCE OF CHRIST 

career so long as death shall come as now it comes, 
in garments of mystery, will the human mind 
approach it with joy, except in cases where the 
feelings outrun the reflection, or in cases where 
long sorrow has broken the heart and made 
Heaven a perpetual longing. But Christ has sur- 
passed all influences in sweetening the heart in its 
relations to the world to come. The immense 
hymnology of this era, the voices of the outside 
orators and writers from Burke to Webster, from 
Franklin, who entreated his daughter never to omit 
her prayers, to Lincoln, whose spirit was full of the 
life beyond, all these voices of man in his highest 
estate, show us that all the souls of our generations 
are marching along to a music first sounded within 
the spirit of Christ. Be our fellow men in the 
Church or outside of it, around them pours this 
pensiveness of immortality, crowding into the soul 
like life-blood pouring through the heart. In calm, 
Christ comes as the eternal beauty ; in storm, He 
comes as the eternal peace. A Christian in mid- 
ocean wrote as follows : 

Borne upon the ocean's foam, 
Far from native land and home, 
Midnight's curtain dense with wrath 
Hanging o'er our venturous path 



ON THE HUMAN SPIRIT. 81 

While the mountain wave is rolling, 
And the ship's bell faintly tolling. 
Saviour! on the stormy sea, 
Bid us rest secure in thee. 

The same sentiment follows us on both land and 
ocean. It has become a part of the consciousness 
that makes up human life. It is true many seem to 
possess it not, but we seek not a sentiment perfectly 
universaL Not all the human race loves beauty, not 
all love the pursuit of truth, yet the love of truth 
is a sentiment that impresses us with its universality 
and power. So there may be spirits living and 
dying unaffected by the Son of Man, but when we 
seek for an influence that is molding deeply the 
heart, we find it here in Nazareth. Whether Mr. 
Lincoln repeats his poem, 

Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud ? 

whether Macaulay, dying, wishes to take the sacra- 
ment, whether Payson prays, or Bunyan dreams, 
whether a child commits itself to God at night, or a 
Cranmer sees Heaven through the light of the fagot, 
it is all one scene — that of Jesus Christ affecting 
deeply the inmost spirit of man. 

Look into this soul, gradually becoming Christ- 
like, and find in its beauty the best argument of im- 
6 



82 INFLUENCE OF CHRIST ON THE HUMAN SPIRIT. 

mortality. As the approaching day in June tips first 
the mountain tops, and then by slow advance reveals 
the leaf upon the highest branches of the tree by 
your window, so the light of immortality, falling 
down from the sky, strikes first the loftiest hearts, 
and though they be few in number, and though a 
sinful multitude lie in ignorance and vice at their 
feet, yet, upon these lofty ones you may see falling 
the white light of immortal life. Let us call it 
Heaven, and place Christ in the midst of the 
approaching scene. 



MIIs~OK QUALITIES OF CUEIST. 



SERMON V. 
MINOR QUALITIES OE CHRIST. 



T I ^HE influence of Jesus Christ is so varied in its 
-^- character that we are in danger of overlooking 
the lesser results. The atonement may hide other 
facts, as the great sparkling planets seem, at night, 
to dwarf the fixed stars. He who would do the 
great heavens justice must study also the distant 
Orion and the obscure nebulae. It is probable that 
the Roman Church has deeply injured itself by its 
long, fixed gaze at Christ in only two lights, as a 
sacrifice for sin and as a ruler of nations. He is 
thus made an ambitious prince, adding state after 
state to His empire ; and an apologist for sinners, by 
making perpetual compensation for their daily sills 
in the offering up of His body in the mass. Men 
come to this Christ with their sins to be forgiven, 
not to be cured; and even the dead are brought 
before Him to be pardoned rather than transformed. 
Hence that Church comes to us to-day great in its 



86 MINOR QUALITIES OF CHRIST. 

political power because it has seen Christ as king, 
and great in its absolution of sinners because it has 
seen Christ only as a pardoner of the guilty. Here 
and there a heart has seen Christ in some other 
light, and has become a Sister of Charity or a self- 
denying missionary of the cross. 

Christ is a wide, deep, moral world. He who 
finds only one idea or one beauty in Christ, is one 
who should find upon earth only one plan, and in 
the heavens only one fount of cloud or light. It is 
an injurious human weakness if we say Christ is 
divine, and then feel that we have found all this 
divinity in the atonement or in the resurrection. 
Thus have we put Deity into a narrow cell, too 
narrow to be even fully human, much less divine. 
That which we call divine must overflow. It must 
not run like a rivulet, but roll like the sea. There 
are myriads of persons who can not accept of Christ 
as an atonement, but who are drawing the guidance 
and the hope of life from His words and actions. 
There are others who identify Christ and the Father, 
and are blessed with this nearness of God; while 
there are others who feel that Christ is only a 
super-human being, but who undergo an exaltation 
of character by following this lofty ideal. Little 
children find in Christ an image of their own spirit ; 



MINOM QUALITIES OF CHRIST. 



the Sister of Charity finds in Him the attributes of 
a woman ; the devoted missionary to the wilds of 
the Indian finds in the same Christ the attributes of 
a hero. This comes not to pass because the human 
heart can see in the world only what it wishes to 
see, and nothing more and nothing less, but sees all 
this variety of moral worth because it is all in Christ 
just as there is a fullness in God's material world. 
There will always be more in Christ than any heart 
can get out of Him. It is my wish this morning to 
ask you to look at some of the minor qualities in 
this great Son of Man and God. 

1. He possessed a simplicity of mind that gave 
Him at once to all conditions of men. He was 
divorced from all speculative philosophy and wedded 
to universal practical life. The deep inquiries and 
unusual language of philosophers create a gulf 
between them and the people. The world at large 
cares nothing about Aristotle, and Plato, and Des- 
cartes, and Kant, because these names are entangled 
amid the unusual verbiage and the final arguments 
of abstract thought, and seem to stand thus afar off 
from the real world of man. Christ moved amid all 
the great ideas that have ^ concerned all the philoso- 
phers from Greece to England, but He moved along 
with the assumptions of one who depended not 



88 MINOR QUALITIES OF CHRIST. 

upon argument, and with the simple language of 
common life. Christ did not pass by the realm of 
debate, but He moved through it with a faith, and 
ease, and naturalness, and simplicity, that made Him 
the voice not of a few scholars, but of the world's 
vast majority. His words were the simplest in 
speech and His laws the most acceptable to reason. 
The obscure arguments of the abstract philosophers 
are more the world's misfortune than its delight. 
They may be a necessity, but they are not a popular 
shape of intellectual action. At last the world 
becomes weary of the terms and the arguments, and 
the dust of the ages bears witness to the world's 
neglect. 

It is now well known that the highest education 
itself tends to a simplicity of words and thought. 
Youth and romantic years may love obscure dream- 
ings, and there are conditions of intellect that 
delight in the unfathomable of thought, but the 
world as a vast body of rational beings delights in 
truths the clearest and language the simplest. As 
the open sunlight is dear to all, so men love to sit 
down in the best light of truth. And if this is not 
true of all the days of men, it is true of their best 
days at least, the days of most sincerity and 
solemnity. To all who live in lands that know the 



MINOR QUALITIES OF CHRIST. 89 

history of Christ, His words come in the last days, 
the most sober days, and alone satisfy the heart. 
Dying hours utterly despise the stately language of 
philosophy, theological or metaphysical, and betake 
themselves to simplicity. There is no pomp in the 
chamber of death. The greatest statesman or the 
greatest scholar whispers his final words in the 
language of perfect simplicity. This comes not 
because the physical organism has passed from 
power to weakness, but because the solemnity of 
the hour has utterly displaced vanity. Coming into 
the world as little children, thus we also pass out 
of it. Now, the matchless simplicity of Christ fits 
Him to these last hours of man, and those who have 
all their life long dealt in magnificence of words 
and theory, at last say, " Read me the words of 
Jesus. They alone are clear, sweet and sublime." 
Had Christ enveloped Himself in the drapery of a 
stately eloquence, or in the obscure arguments of 
the theologians; or had He sought the associations 
of scholarship, and burdened His text with a world 
of quotation and allusion, what a mighty throng, 
not only of earth's humble ones, but even of 
earth's great, would have been compelled at last to 
turn away from Him and seek elsewhere the 
simplicity that seems so full of peace. There is a 



90 MINOR QUALITIES OF CHRIST. 



place in the world for all the splendor of rhetoric, 
and music, and art, and for all the jewels of gold 
and the fabrics of velvet and silk; we decry none 
of these things, but there are times when all these 
splendid things count as naught. There are times 
when the spirit asks, not for a great chorus of 
music, but for a soft strain, a subdued song from 
one voice, or an air from an instrument where a 
hand rests upon the strings. There was an hour 
when Mozart wished to hear only the Requiem. 
Thus in the vast world of thought there are times 
in the life of each being, however educated and. 
great, when the soul asks not for argument, but for 
food; not for magnificence of sound, but for simple 
words of life and hope. Christ is fortunate in that 
he uttered words just such as men need in their 
best hours, words not noisy like a military band 
cheering men onward to ambition and bloodshed, 
but sweet like a harp, helping the soul to pass 
resignedly from these shores. In our days of vigor 
and success and world-worship, there may come 
moments when we may wish Jesus had left behind 
Him masterpieces of eloquence, such as we can now 
read over the graves of Sumner and Burke, those 
giants of argument and passion and language, but 
these hours are rather the children of temporary 



MINOR QUALITIES OF CHRIST. 91 

vanity than of true greatness. Do not permit these 
proud days to deceive you. The time is not far 
away when you will feel that it is not in the power 
of rhetoric or passion to add any thing to the words 
of Jesus Christ. The metaphysician may secretly 
regret that the Nazarene did not discourse like a 

o 

Plato or a Locke ; the poet may wish that the Son 
of Man had said more about land, sea, and sky, 
about opening spring-time or the falling leaf; the 
Calvinist and Trinitarian may wish they could find" 
in the Lord's discourse a system that should more 
fully shadow forth their own; and devotees of 
science may feel at times that the Cosmos of 
Humboldt surpasses the simple story of the Gospels ; 
but these longings and complaints are ' only the 
result of narrow specializations. Christ spoke for a 
whole world, for the times of its greatest need, and 
the wish of the specialist is engulfed in the wide, 
infinite wish of mankind. Our wishes are the style 
of time : Christ's manner the style of eternity. 

2. Let me ask you now to mark the attractive- 
ness of Christ. What a calamity to mankind, had 
Christ not spoken from an affectionate heart. 
Suppose He had stood apart from society like a 
peripatetic, or had spoken from the icy retreat of 
the stoic, or with the vanity of a schoolman. The 



92 MINOR QUALITIES OF CHRIST. 

words, unattended by friendship, would have died 
like seeds in the earth where there falls no sunshine. 
The words of a father differ all the world over 
from the words of a mother. In later years, young 
men fallen into temptation have remembered the 
words their mothers had spoken. The counsel of 
the father may have been wise and good, but the 
mother's words are transformed into eloquence by 
the love that envelops and penetrates them. The 
father's advice is rhetoric ; the mother's, a sword, a 
flame, a hymn. The former is language for the 
intellect, the latter an arrow in the heart. Thus 
Christ breathed into His language such a solicitude, 
such an affection, that he does not speak to us as 
an orator, but as our friend. He spake as never 
man spake ; not simply with a higher wisdom, but 
with a warmer sympathy. Did Plato, did Zeno, did 
Seneca ever so love the people and so cling to them 
as a mother to her children ? When we recall the 
teachings of the Saviour, and then around them, 
such as they were, throw that affection for man 
which finally led Him to endure the cross, we have 
the elements of a power which shall hand those 
words along to the end of human history, though 
ten thousand years shall intervene. Words are of 
themselves empty vessels. They are only so many 



MINOR QUALITIES OF CHRIST. 93 

cups of silver and gold. They await equally the 
poison of the flatterer, or the boastings of the 
egotist, or the romance of the lover, or the wisdom 
or solicitude of a divine soul. Eloquence is nothing 
but the filling of these cups with the earnestness 
and vital love of the soul. Words from the garrul- 
ous are chalices full of air put to the lips ; words 
full of such love and pity as were in the sacred 
heart are cups full of ciystal water offered us in a 
burning desert. Language depending wholly upon 
the quantity and quality of soul crowded into it, 
the intercourse of Jesus with the world, will always 
stand clothed with a wonderful power. His words 
will charm the living and the dying to the end of 
man's career. His words were urns of gold that 
carried His soul. 

3. Next to this sympathy which secured the per- 
petual attractiveness of Christ, let us observe the 
general breadth of His mind and spirit. All the 
statements of this Son of Man are broad statements. 
His baptism, His faith, His atonement, His maxims, 
His ethics, are all set forth in the widest terms 
known in language. He is the way, truth, and life, 
but the particulars of the way, the details of the 
truth, the manner of the life, are omitted. He says, 
" I am the resurrection and the life," but there is 



94 MINOR QUALITIES OF CHRIST, 

no commitment to the idea that these particles of 
flesh will ever come back to the soul again, or to 
the idea that a new body will be given man in the 
new world. He calls Himself " Saviour" but He 
waits not to place Himself upon the platform of the 
various theories regarding the manner of the great 
price paid or to be paid for the soul. He seems to 
love the broad name of " Saviour " or leader of the 
soul, that all, of whatever age, child or father, of 
whatever condition, learned or unlearned, may take 
the grand word to heart, and draw life and peace 
from its merciful, elastic breath. On account of this 
tendency of Christ to deal in universale, He has 
stood forth in beauty and light even when around 
those who pretended to follow Him has roared the 
storm of debate. The long and bloody conflict that 
has often made the Christian Church resemble the 
arena of Nero's gladiators, or the orgies of the 
painted Indians, arose out of these limited intellects 
which emerged from cells and convents and inquired 
whether the atonement was limited or general, 
whether the halo about the Christ was derived or 
underived, and whether the Holy Ghost proceeded 
eternally from the Father alone or from both the 
Father and the Son. Even the great and progressive 
Dollinger, in his recent convention, has drawn up 



MIXOM QUALITIES OF CHRIST. 95 



some new articles about the Holy Ghost's proceed- 
ing " patre filioque," thus showing how difficult it 
is for a man or an age to divest himself or itself of 
the theological fantasy, that deep-seated hallucina- 
tion. Little of the world's religious turmoil arose 
around Christ. But from the human mind, full of 
darkness and vanity — a sad combination — rolled the 
smoke and fire, as from an infernal Vesuvius, that 
have buried in ashes and death cities and homes 
which under Christ alone would have been Eclens of 
happiness. Above all things religion is a science of 
generalities. It lies broad and deep like the expanse 
of heaven, and like the same heaven will utter few 
particulars. Astronomers tell us Saturn lies within 
beautiful rings, and that Jupiter has equal day and 
night, and that one season runs through all its year, 
but here these wise men pause. Whether beings 
like man dwell there, and gather w 7 ild flowers, and 
hear bird songs in eternal spring, and whether they 
sail ships upon oceans that know no wild storm, they 
are all silent as those awful depths. Religion surpasses 
even astronomy in the breadth and vagueness of its 
generalizations. The theologians, misconceiving its 
genius, have loaded it down with particulars from 
which it will now take them all their remaining life 
to retract. From their lofty mount of egotism they 



96 MINOR QUALITIES OF CHRIST. 

must work their way down to the valley of humilia- 
tion. Unable any longer to tell the multitude just 
when and how God made the universe, they must part 
with old statistics and go to the generality that "In 
the beginning God created the heavens and the 
earth. 9 ' So all through the Christian system where 
the theologians have been most specific they must 
suffer the deepest humiliation and make the most 
marked retreat. 

To illustrate further the breadth of Christ, the 
safeness of His generalizations, mark the flow of 
His thoughts about heaven and hell. In the hands 
of this Christ there is an indignation of God indeed, 
but it is so reasonable and lofty that the human 
mind accepts of it and feels its mysterious power. 
The theologians sought to know the Infinite most 
fully, and hence they beheld the wrath of God 
moving toward the non-elect, or the non-baptized, 
and from all eternity compassing the destruction of 
the vast majority of earth's throngs ; but in the 
philosophy of the Lord the indignation of God 
moves out against the impure, the deceitful, the 
drunken, the cruel, the murderous, the willful 
offenders against God and man. There is a vast 
sentiment of justice in the human heart. We all 
know that God is just. Hence in Shakspeare all 



MINOR QUALITIES OF CHRIST. 97 

the mighty ones that did wrong, from Othello the 
Moor to the dazzling intellect of Lady Macbeth, 
move all toward the bar of justice, and the reader 
of those dramas, or the spectator before the curtain, 
feels that something within is gratified when death 
overtakes all of Avon's evil ones. Endure earth 
ever so long, this sentiment will remain in the 
human heart as eternal as its love of friends or its 
appreciation of the beautiful. But in the hands of 
many of the theologians this deep sentiment of 
right and wrong, and of good or ill desert is so 
outraged, it is so compelled to take in foreordained 
wrath, and wrath suffered for sins, in which the 
sufferer took no part, and of which he has not the 
feeblest consciousness, that it ceases almost to believe 
in God, and in a maze so dark says: "Come what 
may, I can only await a doom that seems alike 
destitute of reason and terrible in power." The 
hope of the world lies in the possibility that the 
multitude will read its destiny more and more in 
the teachings of Jesus Christ. In His Gospel this 
indignation is the holy indignation of a just God. 
It is not a malicious flame shooting out like the 
tongue of a serpent toward those who sinned in 
Adam before they lived, shooting out from eternity, 
with the hiss of a perpetual and infinite rabies, but 
7' 



98 MINOR QUALITIES OF CHRIST. 

it is the justice which the human mind knows 
should follow all willful sin. The justice of Jesus 
Christ is that justice of which the tragedies of 
Shakspeare are a faint image, and which has been 
reflected in the laws of states, and has always been 
imbedded in the soul. Oh, sad day for the Church 
and for human virtue when the teachers of Christi- 
anity turned away from the broad and simple Christ 
and asked the metaphysicians, and monks, and 
fatalists, to give them a detailed map of the Infinite 
One. A Roman priest not long since permitted a 
convert from Protestantism to bury his infant along 
with the Protestant dead if he would inclose in the 
little coffin a lump of consecrated earth, to guard 
the little Catholic soul from sharing in the Protes- 
tant hell. So the little holy earth was placed in 
the coffin to come between the infant and the 
divine wrath. And a few weeks since Archbishop 
Purcell, in speaking of a railway workman killed in 
an accident, who had, being a Protestant, lived 
happily with a Catholic wife, said that the children 
of that poor widow were not only fatherless, but 
were doomed to perdition at last, for Heaven could 
receive only the families of the purely Catholico 

I mention these caricatures of the Creator because 
they have transpired most recently, and hence can 



MINOR QUALITIES OF CHRIST. 99 



not be charged upon the sixteenth century ; but I 
could, in a few moments' reading, have found, away 
from the Roman Church, notions of God's justice as 
injurious and as disgraceful. From him who studies 
the Son of Man, all this desecration of the divine 
disappears, and the righteousness of the Father in 
Heaven becomes the preventing fear and the dear 
hope of every heart. That God will approve of 
nothing wrong, is the hope of the world as to virtue. 
That He will reward those who love Him is the 
refuge of peace for each soul. In presence of the 
God unveiled by Christ, the mother may in perfect 
hope lay down her infant in the grave. She needs 
place no holy earth in its coffin, no baptism upon its 
forehead ; she need read no ambiguous words from 
the rubric or the confession, for the God in Christ 
is a great God, and none but the consciously and 
willingly sinful need tremble at His wrath. As 
for the children in their tombs, they need no inter- 
vention of holy water or holy ground. All the mal- 
edictions of earth, all the condemnatory laws of all 
the bishops, all the anathemas of a thousand popes, 
could not detain one of those little souls a moment 
from the bosom of God. 

Now, these are some of the minor tones in that 
sublime symphony called the Christ. And if these 



100 MINOR QUALITIES OF CHRIST. 

are only a few notes from the masterpiece, what 
must the whole diapason be to the soul that shall 
listen to the music as it rolls along from the human 
to the divine ? Lending your ear at times to this 
harmony of love and truth, you will at last beg the 
children of men to cease their clamor, to terminate 
their discord, and leave you to fill your longing, 
hoping spirit with this ravishing requiem from the 
sky. 



THE FUTUEE OVEEWOEKED. 



SERMON VI. 
THE FUTURE OVERWORKED. 



"Now is the accepted time." — 2 Got. 6:2. 

TF it be true, as the optimist teaches, that every 
-*- evil has its good, it is also true that every good 
carries its own evil. One statement is as true as 
the other. The meaning of all such statements must 
be that life is full of conflicting forces, physical and 
spiritual, and that to balance these in such a manner 
that usefulness and happiness may result, is the 
problem and duty of man. 

Among the supposed virtues of this world, men 
have assigned a high place to its great law of pro- 
gress. It is the consolation of all hearts that we 
are all moving forward to all that is noble in intel- 
lect and sentiment. The privilege of this forward 
movement is at least supposed to be offered to all, 
and there are many who contend that not simply 
the privilege but the destiny of progress rests upon 
all. This at least is true, that a grand law of 



104 THE FUTURE OVERWORKED. 

advance pervades the universe, and reveals itself in 
the seed of the oak, in the development of animal 
life, and in the unfolding of the human intellect. 
We look back and at once pity our fathers, for our 
boat has floated away from their barren, wintry 
shore, far down to what seems to us the land of 
spontaneous harvest and perpetual spring. Progress 
is real and beautiful, a great law of man full of 
present happiness and of hope. Of this great good 
what now is the evil side? What is the drop of 
poison in this cup ? It is found in the fact, that 
this coming glory of the future is always drawing 
the heart away from the present. In our inability 
to see two objects at once, we gaze at the future 
and sit down and wait for it to come. Thus the 
great outlook of the soul is suffered to neutralize 
the idea of doing with one's might what the hand 
finds to do. 

There is no way for abating the evil, so far as 
all the world is concerned, but the evil is grave 
enough to merit notice, and then there may be here 
and there an individual heart that will perceive the 
evil and fly from it. It would be a great gain to 
our store of practical philosophy and religion if we 
could learn to feel that the future does not create 
nor bring progress: it only receives it. It is only a 



THE FUTURE OVERWORKED. 105 



storehouse into which the present empties itself. If 
the present be barren, the future remains empty also, 
and, moving itself further away, waits for a laborious, 
patient present to precede it. The future is only 
the final estimate, the summing up of all the former 
days. There is no honor, or learning, or salvation, in 
it, except so far as the present is busy over the 
learning, or honor, or salvation. 

It is to be regretted that we make bad use of the 
virtues of the soul. God implanted hope and expec- 
tation in the breast to cheer it, to make it able to 
bear dark hours, and as such it is one of the noblest 
virtues of the soul. Paul places it down among the 
divinities of earth, between Faith and Charity. But 
this virtue planted in the bosom to cheer it, is per- 
verted from its office and is transformed into the 
thing hoped for. Hope is metamorphosed into actual 
riches, actual goodness, actual religion. Instead of 
toiling at a new world, we think hope is busy fixing 
it all up for us. Years pass by in dreamy indolence 
because that great thing called progress seems to be 
out in the advance preparing all the forms of bless- 
edness, earthly and heavenly. We have personified 
hope and progress until they have become actual 
laborers, going on before us, making paths and build- 
ing homes for us. And so well are they doing this 



106 THE FUTURE OVERWORKED. 

world-work that nothing remains for us but to 
dream and wait. Wonderful and essential as the 
demand of expectation is in all the days of man, yet 
it seems that at all times man should look into the 
face of the present and see what meaning there may 
be in its quiet countenance. The present is the 
eventful day. The future is only the summing up 
of that which has gone by. 

In the discussion of our theme to-day, all the 
issues of life are alike interested. Religion, and edu- 
cation, and business, and home, and the uncounted 
details of a busy life, are all affected by this potency 
of the future. They are all liable to be cheered by its 
proper use or blinded by its bad application. All 
the passions of the soul need regulation. Man can 
not, like a brute, follow nature. In food, -and drink, 
and work, and play, and sleep, man dare not follow 
the simple desires of his physical organism. If a 
man sleeps to the uttermost from boyhood up to 
middle life, his mind weakens and he becomes an 
idiot from too much sleep. He may, also, fail and 
die from too little. So all through the catalogue of 
physical and mental tastes and tendencies man can 
not follow nature. He was destined to follow 
another guide called reason, a being appointed of 
heaven to discriminate, to impel and impede, to cheer 



THE FUTURE OVERWORKED. 107 

and to warn. Thus ambition, and the love of 
knowledge, and the love of money, and all the appe- 
tites of the body and soul, are to come to the bar 
of reason and receive their orders for the day, — 
orders of advance or retreat. 

To cultivate reason is, therefore, one of the 
highest duties, because then her wise orders are 
issued to all the other impulses of the soul, and a 
varied world passes from chaos into harmony. Is 
there any thing then in which we can trust nature 
alone ? Are there any hours that are independent 
of this reason ? It appears not. But there are 
hours into which it has not been the world's custom 
to bring reason into play. There are hours in which 
we all act like so many little children, and know 
no law but nature. Among these hours are those 
of hope and fond anticipation. To-morrow is loaded 
down with the things we intend to do and to have. 
There is no faculty of the soul so overworked as 
this faculty of expectation. If all shall come out 
of the future which we are all pouring into it, we 
shall have a marvelous world before long. The 
tame, sad facts of these days will soon give place 
to islands of milk and honey, and to palaces of 
Aladdin. 

The influence of the future is, like the love of 



108 THE FUTURE OVERWORKED. 

ambition or gold, to be regulated. If we suffer this 
beauty of futurity to run wild in our breast, it 
makes us sickly dreamers, who will die at last as an 
infant. What God gave us as a consolation in 
sorrow, men transform into a reason of existence, an 
object of life. The morrow thus neutralizes the 
present, and to-day is empty and worthless. When 
a young man lives in the expectation of a fortune, 
to come to him in middle age, how for the most 
part it utterly ruins his youth. Books, professions, 
industry, ambition, self-culture, are all robbed of 
worth by this powerful expectation. The young 
man is thus slain by his future. But by his side a 
companion who is doomed to a life of toil finds in 
books and ambition and culture and profession a 
daily power and happiness, and by them he rises in 
mind and soul. To the former the future was over- 
loaded. It was too rosy, too certain. It eclipses 
the present. Expectation often surpasses poverty 
and sorrow as a blight of life. In the early years 
of life there is nothing but the future before the 
mind. The young are excluded from the great 
fields of usefulness, of bar, and pulpit, and author- 
ship, and trade. Hence, the first twenty years are 
years of only expectation. This may be a reason 
why, in our mature period, all still look at the 



THE FUTURE OVERWORKED. 109 

morrow. Having spent twenty years in the service 
of this kind of romance, perhaps it becomes a part 
of our nature difficult to escape. Be the cause this 
or that, the fact remains that here we all are to-day 
still loading the morrow down with our intentions. 
We can not put away childish things. 

It is not the province of the pulpit, perhaps, to 
point out what injury this habit is working in 
business, and politics, and culture, and to home life 
and general happiness. The whole field is, at least, 
too large for our hasty survey. Let us limit our 
thoughts to the great paths of philanthropy and 
religion. The evils which the rosy future brings to 
those departments are subject of thought large 
enough and painful enough for one hour. 

It would not be beyond the truth were I to say 
that there are a thousand persons in this city who 
intend to bless mankind by gifts of benevolence. 
When a little more gold has been gathered, and a 
few more gray hairs have come, and the dear future 
shall have come a little nearer, they are going to 
found asylums, and art-galleries, and libraries, and 
colleges, and, bursting the chains of self, love the 
large suffering world. These intentions are the most 
solemn and noble of their hearts. Nearly every 
clergyman has conversed with these good men, and 



110 THE FUTURE OVERWORKED. 

can bear witness to their sincerity. These are good 
people at heart. But we come, now, to the defect 
in their scheme — a defect that hides itself, and, like 
Satan, will deceive the very elect. The calamity of 
these well-wishing hearts, and the calamity of the 
long-waiting public is simply this, that there is no 
such future any where as that one pictured in the 
dream of these benevolent men. The day when 
they shall feel that they have heaped up enough of 
gold; the day when they will be willing to part 
with it; the day when they will love the poor com- 
munitjr, and will desire to lay down great offerings 
at its feet, and when the future so long dreamed of 
will come down in golden colors out of the sky, 
will never come. The morrow is only to-day carried 
forward. Of the thousands of persons who to-day 
fully intend to spend their money for God and 
society, only one or two will find the future what 
they thought, and, perhaps, that one or two will be 
the humblest of the thousand, both as to the power 
to give and the scope of the benefaction. The 
future, to a man in middle or mature life, will 
contain very little not to be found now in his soul. 
To-morrow is only a point in the river a little 
nearer the sea. The same water flows there that 
flowed a hundred miles above. It is a sad thing 



THE FUTURE OVERWORKED. Ill 

when one must point to these passing hours, and 
must remind his neighbor and confess for himself 
that they are the photograph of the remainder of 
life. To-morrow will only be to-day rolled on. 
While we are passing along through the early years, 
it is lawful for us to load the times to come, for 
then the bodv and the mind are strengthening for 
work, and the school house stands between us and 
the great duties of the world; but when manhood 
has fully come, this worship of to-morrow should be 
given up, and the full significance of the present 
should burst upon the intellect and soul. All the 
dazzle of to-morrow, after that, is only an ignis- 
fatuus. 

There are colleges about this city that have been 
waiting twenty years for the good intentions of rich 
men to ripen. There are many forms of public 
beneficence that have been reposing in manuscript 
for a quarter of a century, waiting for the future to 
evolve for them a realit3 r from the generous and 
promising heart. But the real truth is, there is 
nothing in the morrow that was not in the yester- 
day, and one by one these designing, promising hearts 
have fallen asleep without having come up to the 
golden clays when benevolence would be a pleasure 
and monev would no longer enslave the soul. The 



112 THE FUTURE OVERWORKED. 

time for action is in the full noon of life. As that 
is the time when orators utter their best orations, 
and poets write their best poems, and painters spread 
their most truthful colors — the time when all life 
blooms — that is the time for the works of benevo- 
lence and religion. What use to make of one's 
property, is a question that demands the highest 
powers of the mind. To bring to that problem the 
weakness of old age is to insult reason, and to peril 
one's own name. Mankind is doubly robbed by the 
romance of the future ; robbed in that many die 
without having remembered mankind, and in that 
many others remembered the world foolishly. They 
left second childhood to dispose of their fortunes. 
If there is one phrase which should be graven upon 
the heart, it is the Bible phrase, " Now is the day 
of salvation." The divine words apply on all sides. 
Not only Heaven, but also all the great objects this 
side of Heaven, are depending upon man's realization 
of the meaning of the word now. Man has been 
successful only in these circumstances where he 
could not wait. When events have hemmed him in, 
when his ships have been burned behind him, when 
his enemy has pressed him closely upon the field of 
battle or of the intellect, then, when the gates of 
the future have been closed, and those of the 



THE FUTURE OVERWORKED 113 

present thrown open, man has always been a hero. 
Some of the most biting aphorisms of the great 
writers have been uttered against the spirit of delay 
that broods over the soul. One says, " We pass our 
life in deliberation, and die in it." " Delays have 
dangerous ends," says Shakspeare. " To-morrow is 
a satire on to-day," said Young. But Cervantes 
states well the folly of feeding eternally upon hope. 
He says : " By the street called By-and-by, you 
reach a house called Never." Thus in the literature 
of all ages, from the Bible to the page of the Span- 
iard, 3^011 find that mankind early learned the impo- 
sition that expectation was playing upon it, and 
sought out biting words to warn us against its snare. 
The great mission of hope is to inspire the present. 
The dazzling glory of the future is only to make 
the present all light around the foot. But if man 
sits down and waits till he shall come to the dazzling 
morrow, the morrow at once becomes dark ; it takes 
back every banner of light, because the gazing soul 
has not read aright its significance. As the past 
throws its light upon the present, tells us what 
thinkers, and toilers, and singers, said and sang, and 
what the patriots fought for in those long years, so 
the future pours its inspiration out upon the present, 
that, aroused by the world past and the world to 



114 THE FUTURE OVERWORKED. 

come, the soul may realize the supreme greatness of 
life, and rise to deeds worthy of the hour. A 
promise to be or do in the far future is a kind of 
airy, dreamy lie. It should seem that our politics, 
our acts, our love to our neighbor, our acceptance of 
Jesus Christ, are all to be slaughtered by this new 
enemy called " expectation." We are all intending 
to live. All the varied good of earth, from kindness 
to the poorest mortal to a profound worship of the 
Almighty, is lying in our intention. But the scene 
is delusive. It is a mirage in a desert. When we 
have moved on we shall find that no river or lake 
was really before us ; it was all burning sand. 

We have all set up a new divinity. We have 
richly decorated her shrine, and our worship is regu- 
lar and passionate. And this divinity is not money. 
It is not pleasure. It is a beautiful, ethereal being 
called The Future. To her care we are committing 
politics, art, home-life, and religion. This goddess is 
coming to us after a few years with her arms full 
of all kinds of salvation. We need only worship and 
wait. 

Was there ever such a false worship along the 
Niger or the Ganges? The future is not an actor; 
it is only a result. It adds up the transactions of 
to-day.* 



THE FUTURE OVERWORKED. 115 

When, after an absence of twenty years, you visit 
the old homestead and find the old orchard gone, 
and the old house dismantled, its door-side moss-cov- 
ered, you say, hastily, " What changes time has 
wrought!" But it was the agencies acting in time, 
the daily storms, the frosts, the winds, the worm, 
that slowly transformed the old home into decay. 
Thus the Future has no potency. The present is 
working all sad changes, and the future is only the 
point at which the heart must break. 

When hope cheers the present, and acts as an 
inspiration to its toil and goodness, then hope is a 
good angel ; but the moment hope acts as an opiate 
upon the present, it becomes a poison of the soul. 
Rather than worship her, one would better deify the 
present and come each morning with new homage. 
" Now " is an idea that should be more deeply 
studied by those capable of any usefulness. The 
money-makers alone have fathomed its depths. They 
alone " never put off till to-morrow what can be 
done to-day." But the moralists, and religionists, 
and possible benefactors, have not studied enough 
the little word. All the good ideas of earth, even 
the invitations of Jesus Christ, are postponed, and 
postponed until these great " hopes deferred make 
the public heart sick." The arguments in favor of 



116 THE FUTURE OVERWORKED. 

"Now" are short and sharp. 1. The morrow is 
uncertain. The only sure thing for the future is a 
tomb for each one. It may come next autumn, next 
winter, next spring. It may come by a sinking ship, 
or a burning church, or a fever that shrouds the 
intellect, or a paralysis that strikes the heart. The 
probability that you will approach death slowly, and 
that your good schemes will come up before you in 
that hour for final and wise adjustment, is only one 
in fifty. 2. The soul needs in these years the edu- 
cation, the noble consciousness, that comes from duty 
already done. The intention to do right things and 
beautiful things is poor food for the soul. But 
when one in the noon of life can already see good 
works back of him, then his present is free forever 
from emptiness, and the nobleness of yesterday 
becomes a part of the soul's essential character. 

What the mind needs in the last part of life is 
the consciousness of having lived the former part 
well. Dryden says : " To-morrow, do thy worst, for 
I have lived to-day." The heart that intends to do 
good deeds is in great peril. If any thing comes 
between it and its deeds it becomes at once a zero. 
It is like the Persian prince who divided his life 
up in decades — the first decade for travel, the 
second for government, the third for friendship, the 



THE FUTURE OVERWORKED. 117 

fourth for God. A magnificent appointment, but 
overthrown by an incident — he died in the first ten 
years. But suppose life to run along, and death to 
be far away ; what man most needs is that the large 
part of his life should come first, that all the subse- 
quent years may be lifted up and held up by the 
strong arms of the past. It is melancholy to have 
the soul realize the greatness of earth when it is 
just leaving it forever. 

But time fails us. Let me remind you that the 
great outside world needs your benevolence and 
religion now. In twenty years the countless chil- 
dren and the countless poor of this city and the 
land will have passed beyond the valley of blessing. 
There is a multitude which no one can bless but 
you, and you can do that service only now. The 
good that shall come a score of years hence will 
come to a different throng. Those that now swarm 
around you will have passed away, uneducated, 
uncheered, unloved. Some poetess, sitting in a 
lonely room and reading about the tears of love and 
pity that had fallen over some orphan's grave, wrote 
a touching rebuke in the poem, "Love me before I 
die." After our friends have gone from us, we love 
them. With such a land as we possess, full of lib- 
erty and wealth, with such multitudes around that 



118 1HE FUTURE OVERWORKED. 

need all things for mind and soul ; with such a 
leader as Jesus Christ, and with the morrow all 
wrapped in uncertainty, and the tomb not far away, 
the words that should most burn in the heart are 
these : " Now is the accepted time." 

If any further argument were needed to convince 
you what an empty thing that " future" of the 
heart is, I would find it in showing you that future 
itself. It can be seen and measured. Ten years ago 
you promised certain good deeds after the next ten 
years were out. All was decked in the hues of the 
rainbow. The profession of religion would be easy, 
and all the details of a noble soul would come easily 
then. What an outlook it was ! But to-day those 
ten years have ended, and this is that very future 
once seen as being near to Heaven. Oh, how its 
flowers have faded ! It was a mirage, and here is 
the same dreary, lifeless sand. 

Be wise to-day; 'tis madness to defer; 

Next day the fatal precedent will plead; 

Thus on, till wisdom is pushed out of life. 
* % ^ * * 

Of man's miraculous mistakes this bears 
The palm. " That all men are about to live." 



AMONG THE FOUNDATIONS. 



SERMON VII. 
AMONG- THE FOUNDATIONS. 



" Of whom the world was not worthy." — Hebrews 11 : 38. 

ET us recall to mind some of the great men of 
-*-^ the Bible. Each institution, be it state or 
church, or college or school of philosophy or art, 
sets forth from the bosom of some man or men like 
a river rolling down from the mountains. All these 
great outward things, from the Porch at Athens to 
the Academy of France, are the image of certain 
human spirits. As lightning leaves its marks upon 
the granite cliffs, so great minds, passing through 
their three-score years, mark deeply that part of 
society in which their feet fell as they marched. 
The flying steamer and the flying train tell us that 
Watt and Stephenson have passed by just in advance 
of the steamer and the car. The telegraph tells us 
that Morse has been and has passed on. The prac- 
tical industry of the world, the abandoning of old 
implements, the rapid appearance of new machines 



122 AMONG THE FOUNDATIONS. 

and new tools, tell us there must have been a Lord 
Bacon some where, leading reason away from folly, to 
place it in the path of usefulness. Coming to poli- 
tics, we see on all sides in the new free govern- 
ments of earth, footprints of the Barons fighting with 
King John, and of Washington and Lafayette strug- 
gling in the wilds of the new world. The broad 
earth, with all its mental and emotional contents, 
with all its truth and beauty, is only a place where 
man in some form of greatness has been. In the 
old red sandstone of New England, rocks are pointed 
out upon which great birds ran thousands of years 
ago. Perhaps before the human race lived those 
birds spread their half-made wings and hurried along 
on foot before the coming storm. And in those days 
the storms were terrific. The clouds swept hot and 
low, and the whole earth trembled with the thunder. 
Along the great western river there are cliffs a 
thousand feet high, and between them a valley five 
miles wide, the scene telling us what a mighty river 
flowed in that vale before man came to the Garden 
of Eden. Thus the moral earth bears evidence of 
its mighty past, and in all its learning, and politics, 
and art, and religion, says to us: "Here the giants 
have been. These are the paths trodden by their 
heavy feet." 



AMONG THE FOUNDATIONS. 123 

In Africa, hunters seeking large and noble game 
(more noble than the murderous, avaricious creature 
that seeks the ivory spoils), come at last to places where 
the wild rice is all beaten down, where a road lies 
as though the army of Xerxes had passed that way. 
The wild huntsmen are full of delight, for they feel 
the presence of the great ivory-bearing brutes. Thus 
in the higher world of the intellect and soul we 
come upon great paths that tell us in a moment 
that some mighty ones passed along there yesterday. 
But these paths are not a desolation. They are 
hedged in on both sides by flowers ; the air above 
is redolent with incense, and both before and back 
of the discoverer there seems a paradise. 

What is our varied world now but a rich piece 
of work from the hands of the gifted minds in all 
former times? Our whole world is the photograph 
of all past genius. 

Such being the nature of this scene of human 
life, we should expect our Christian religion to be 
also the remains of some old commotion in the mind 
and bosom of man. Such greatness could not have 
come from nothing any more than philosophy came 
without any Bacon or Cousin ; any more than lib- 
erty could have come without any Washington or 
any heroes of the battle-field. Out of nothing comes 



124 AMONG THE FOUNDATIONS. 

nothing. (JEx nihilo nihil fit.') Hence, opening 
the Christian Book and reading its strange page 
from Moses to St. Paul, we are bound to say, 
" Here some moral giants have passed by." For the 
wild rice is all beaten down, and branches of broken 
trees strew the way, and the wild region looks as 
though horsemen and chariot had gone by with a 
shout. Looking at the Decalogue for an hour — a 
reading will not answer the demands of the Ten 
Thoughts — studying for an hour, or a day, that 
digest of principles, and remembering in what an 
age that generalization was made, when slaves were 
flying from bondage and scarcely knew which was 
the better, bondage or freedom, the heart must be 
lost to reason if it does not say over those laws, 
here a huge intellect has been hurling around him 
the large ideas of life, standing amid the ideas of 
sin, like Samson between the columns of the temple, 
needing only to reach out his arms and the whole 
fabric tumbles. 

Pass from the Decalogue to the political career 
of Moses, and there the same vastness appears, only 
it is not a vastness of intellect, but of love. He 
led a large multitude tenderly, as though they were 
his children. By day he advised, and cheered, and 
guided them ; by night he wept and prayed. Not 



AMONG THE FOUNDATIONS. 125 

often do great intellect and great love combine in 
one soul. Generally the one draws away the life- 
blood of the other. The perpetual thought abates 
the love, or the perpetual sentiment abates the 
thought. But here and there in human history 
comes the divine soul, and is equal to the two 
destinies, and as the sun in the heaven can burn up 
a Sahara on the one hand, and paint the lining of a 
daisy on the other, so along comes a mortal here 
and there who can hurl forth great thoughts with 
his brain, and then sit down and weep for the 
humblest beggar or little suffering child. Moses was 
one of these. The greatness of law, of politics, of 
freedom, was upon him. His mind rejected the 
pomp of Egypt's palaces that it might be free. All 
the learning of that powerful empire crystalized in 
his brain. He drank in wisdom as a sponge drinks 
water, and yet, in all the subsequent years of his 
career he was tender-hearted as in the days when 
Pharaoh's daughter took him first in her arms. He 
was a union of power and meekness. 

Pass from the law-giver to the poets of the 
Bible, and here re-appear marks of human greatness. 
The man who wrote the book of Job was no 
ordinary intellect. Imagination is one of the highest 
faculties. It alone is able to rise to some conception 



126 AMONG THE FOUNDATIONS. 

of the universe. The common practical mind knows 
nothing about God's world. It moves about in the 
market place, and stands in its shop all day and all 
year, utterly incapable of thinking of the whole 
heavens and the whole earth. It knows the num- 
bers of its own family and the value of certain 
articles in the market. But along comes the man 
with imagination, and lo, the universe opens its 
gates to his foot. His heart wanders off into the 
eternity past and to come. He becomes a Newton 
or a Herschel in astronomy, or a Humboldt in 
science, or a Cousin in morals, or a Milton in 
poetry. Among these place the men who wrote the 
book of Job or the Psalms, or the glowing rhapso- 
dies of Isaiah and Ezekiel. Who in our day could 
surpass these voices in the richness of their 
imagination and in the sublimity of their song? 

What we call civilization is not the human 
condition that speaks always the most intense 
spiritual words. In a broad age the heart may 
love so many things that it loves nothing deeply. 
When the authors of the book of Job and of the 
Psalms wrote, there was nothing grand in the world 
but religion. There were no arts, no politics, no 
sciences, no romance. The greatest theme of poet 
and harpist was God. Hence, in the early history 



AMONG THE FOUNDATIONS. 127 

of our Bible there came to toil at its pages men 
like Daniel and Isaiah and Ezekiel, who knew of 
nothing great in the world except the Great 
Jehovah. In poverty came all these men, rich only 
in their dreams of the King of kings. To them 
earth was remarkable not for its arts and sciences, 
but as being the temple of God. 

Beneath the Christian's Book there stands a 
wonderful group of illustrious mortals. Pronounce 
the name of John, James, Paul, and then descend 
into the details of their lives. I can not now do 
it. The task were too long. But at all your steps 
in such a review you will come upon the varied 
manifestations of greatness. As in the tropic world, 
turn where the traveler may, new charms greet his 
sense, the charm of morning or evening, noonday or 
midnight, charm of colored birds or colored flowers, 
because there the gigantic sun works in unfettered 
liberty through long summers that have no destroy- 
ing winter freezing the aroma from plants and the 
colors from flowers, so in the religious realm 
whence the Bible came, there was an unfettered 
belief in God and in Christ that lifted upward the 
Apostles' hearts and made them as full of divineness 
as the plants are full of aroma where the rich sun- 
light falls for ever and ever. Paul and John's heart 



128 AMONG THE FOUNDATIONS. 

were steeped in religion like the white wools steeped 
in Tyrian purple. Those souls were golden all 
through and through. The world of fashion and 
riches and fame had disappeared and left them the 
world of religion. 

But there is in those Bible worthies one element 
of greatness to which I have not yet alluded. It 
should come last because it should stand freshest in 
our memories and deepest in our love. Not simply 
were those Bible-makers from Moses to Paul all 
intellectually gifted, but they were almost sublime 
in the heroism of their conduct. We are all by 
nature worshipers of heroes. Heroism is the sub- 
jection of self to the interest of a multitude or of 
a principle. One of the largest .and weakest 
qualities in man is his egotism. Egotism is an 
emotion that makes other people unimportant com- 
pared with self. It is the willingness that others 
should bear the burden of toil and of poverty, that 
others should die on the battle-field, that others 
should care for the poor and sit by the bedside of 
the dying. Egotism is the nomination and the 
election and coronation of self as king. Heroism is 
the opposite sentiment. By as much as the former 
is contemptible, the latter is sublime. As the world 
hates the one, it loves the other. We are all hero 



AMONG TEE FOUNDATIONS. 129 



worshipers by nature, just as by nature we love the 
beautiful of art. Heroism is indeed the beautiful 
in the soul. It is the old image of God coming to 
the surface again as when in scraping off a dingy 
wall in Florence the workmen came upon the por- 
trait of Dante. Often there come men who throw 
aside the rags of self, the tattered vestments of 
beggars, and let out the image of God within. Into 
no institution of man, into no philosophy, into no 
school of art, has there entered such a band of 
heroes as is seen filing down into this book of God. 
It seems perfectly wonderful that each page of the 
Christian's book should have been composed by one 
of these children of heroism. The Bible is a 
Westminster Abbey where none but the great sleep. 
There are two painful exceptions, David and 
Solomon. These are the only two characters of the 
sacred group that pass before us destitute of any 
beauty that need long detain us. David and 
Solomon are mighty ruins lying in the midst of the 
Bible. In them self was greater than society. 
Either one of them would rather overthrow all the 
laws of man than confess that self must have 
boundaries of passion or ambition. Rare in their 
mental endowments, able to compose a lofty psalm, 

or to write proverbs of matchless wisdom, they 

9 - 



130 AMONG THE FOUNDATIONS. 

descended again and again into the lowest condition 
of morals and left their thrones of gold stained with 
dishonor. But there may be a lesson in these ruins 
as valuable as the lesson of heroism that ornaments 
the remainder of the great book. The lesson may 
be particularly valuable in our age. It so happens 
that David and Solomon were the only ones of the 
sacred roll who held in their hands power and 
riches. They only possessed gold and sat upon 
thrones. All the other leaders in this book of 
thought stood forth only as common men. But 
here came two who held in their arms the world's 
empire and boundless longings. It is, therefore, a 
most impressive lesson of life, if of all the great 
names in this record, those rank the lowest who had 
found the most of riches and the most of power. 
Sitting down by those disgraced thrones and recall- 
ing the murder of Uriah, and the low sensuality of 
those once noble kings, the modern student may 
mark how riches and authority often destroy the 
high impulses of the soul, and transform into a 
tyrant and sensualist hearts that were once morally 
beautiful. In these two men a genius above that of 
the multitude was diverted from intellectual and 
moral paths and sent out into the haunts of reckless 
ambition and brutal vice. Had some so-called 



AMONG THE FOUNDATIONS. 131 



calamity come and stripped David and Solomon of 
their riches and crowns, and sent them, like Isaiah, 
to find a home in the desert, they would have 
sought communion with truth and with God, and 
would have sunk to their tombs as the sun sinks in 
the West, not to be for ever quenched, but to shine 
on upon other times and shores. What, then, are 
riches but an eclipse of the soul? 

Away from these two names, the soul comes to 
the front and maintains its divine rights in the 
lonely mountains with Moses and in the exile of St. 
John. No riches nor office came to divide the 
heart. Nothing remained to Moses, to Isaiah, to 
Paul, James, and John, but to serve God and man 
faithfully and then die and go to heaven. All 
through human history the mind and heart have 
evolved the most power only when most of the 
avenues of common pleasure and common pursuits 
have been closed, and when no gate has stood open 
but the gate of thought. When the banks are 
taken away from a river its waters spread out and 
the current ceases, and instead of an Amazon or a 
Danube we have only a marsh. The waters lose 
their clearness and their purity. So with mind. 
When, as in the history of the two Hebrew kings, 
all the restraining walls are taken away, the soul 



132 AMONG THE FOUNDATIONS. 

loses purpose and power, and lies only a sluggish 
marsh. When, however, there are marked and iron- 
like banks within which the mind must run, then 
we have a soul that pours along, clear, and bright, 
and deep. Within a definite and beautiful channel 
moved all the heroism of the Old and New Testa- 
ments. It was a part of the Divine Providence 
(the whole of which we call inspiration), that gave 
these men their isolation, and through it their 
spiritual power. The poverty of the prophets, their 
half-wild life, their perfect concentration upon 
religion, were natural agencies that helped lift their 
souls up toward Deity. Their heroism was not that 
only of a soldier who dares the chance of battle, 
but it was also that of a philosopher who despises 
the pleasures and applause of the fashionable world. 
If you ask the wide world in all its high civiliza- 
tion, from old Babylon to Athens, and onward to 
London and Paris, wherein lies the success of man, 
that broad, flashing world will tell you, by actions 
if not by words, that riches, and feasting, and power, 
and palaces, and titles, and the beauty of woman, 
the hilarity of wine, the romance of song, make up 
the significance of human life. In such a many- 
colored light society has always moved along in its 
dance of life and death. To oppose this dazzling 



AMONG THE FOUNDATIONS. 133 

scene, and live such a life as Paul lived, is a sort of 
heroism that reminds us of a shore beyond earth 
and of a race above man. To pass by such a 
magnificent scene as earth presents in its palaces, 
and gaze out into the abstract truth of religion, is a 
heroism like unto that of the soldier who bares his 
bosom that the truths of liberty may live after him. 
When we remember what doubts han^ around the 
idea of God, and around the idea of Christ; what 
an uncertainty about the fact and quality of the 
future life, — an uncertainty that has followed the 
human heart in all times, — and then behold the 
Apostles giving up all else for this dream of eternity, 
forever parting with home and riches and honor and 
daily pleasures, it would seem that that is a dead 
heart which can look upon this Bible picture without 
tears. 

Could all the worthies, from Isaiah to St. John, 
have drawn aside the veil of the future, and have 
seen what a mighty part in far-off nations their 
words were to plaj T ; could the prophet have heard 
the Christians of the nineteenth century reading his 
word picture of the Redeemer, and could St. John 
have seen millions in the coming America poring 
over his fourteenth chapter, they might easily have 
endured all possible sorrows in view of the harvest 



134 AMONG THE FOUNDATIONS. 



in religion to wave on far-off shores. But before 
them lay the clouds that always shut off the future. 
They saw not the sublime reality. They walked in 
the solemnity of darkness, and as one by one they 
came to death, their mighty souls fed not upon sight, 
but upon the heroism of a lofty faith. As Washing- 
ton's heart often sunk in the dark days of the Rev- 
olution, and as another President in our more recent 
trials often found the heavens dark above him and 
piteously prayed for help, so we know that at times 
the saints of the New Testament must have looked 
with sadness into each other's faces and have won- 
dered whether just beyond the tomb Jesus would 
indeed come with His Paradise. And especially 
must these solemn thoughts have come crowding 
into the heart when upon the next day death was 
to come by the fagot or the axe. Death has always 
been a deep solemnity. 

When we read the Bible remembering the quality 
of life these men lived and the quality of death they 
died, all criticism of words and phrases seems utterly 
childish, for their grand life was of itself an inspira- 
tion. To seek contradiction of little terms, or 
variation of narrative, or discord of incident, is like 
objecting to the effulgence of the sun on account of 
its spots. It is a law of criticism that no error of 



AMONG THE FOUNDATIONS. 135 

grammar or of metaphor may weigh any thing against 
the writer who deals in powerful thought. As a 
false pronunciation or a rude syntax did not so much 
as mar the impetuous eloquence of a Patrick Henry 
or even a Henry Clay, all these infinitesimal things 
counting naught in the mighty current of the true 
and the good, so in these divine men of religion the 
errors of language, of time, of place, are in the midst 
of the high truths of the writers only as autumn 
leaves borne along by a river. The time will per- 
haps come when mankind will not look for inspira- 
tion in the geology or astronomy of the Bible, nor 
in the machine-like exactness of part to part, but 
will seek for it in that vast religion of time and 
eternity that lies in the sacred page like a continent 
upon the bosom of an ocean. The inspiration of a 
St. Paul or St. John lies not in the minute details 
of grammar or history, but in the Christian doctrine 
of life that flashes up from their souls like the 
columns of light streaming up from the northern 
horizon. When you, my friends, find your minds full 
of the critical, even the captious, spirit over the 
writings of these men, move a few paces away from 
your measuring-rules, and stand by the block where 
Paul is bowing to yield up his life, and hear him 
saying, " God forbid that I should glory save in the 



136 AMONG THE FOUNDATIONS. 

cross of Christ," and the stillness and solemnity 
of the event, and the sublimity of the words, will 
make you recall all your objections, and wish that 
into your own heart might come such a presence of 
God. You will feel that inspiration is the transfig- 
uration of a soul so that it reaches the true, the 
beautiful, and the good. A transfiguration not of 
the little, but of the great. 

The heroes of the Bible make up such a group 
of pearls as never before in history were strung upon 
one string. Christianity is the only queen that ever 
wore such a collection of gems. But she wears 
them right along, and has thus been unapproachable 
for thousands of years. And she will remain match- 
less in the quality of soul that lay beneath her 
thought. It does not seem possible that earth can 
ever reproduce a St. Paul or a St. John. And now, 
when to these beings you have added just one more 
whom I need not so much as name ; a Being who 
emptied an ocean of love and hope upon the world, 
and who has transformed the earth, making it roll out 
of darkness into light, you will conclude that here 
in the Christian records mighty souls have passed in 
a strange vision before us. Here are tremendous 
foundations, broad, deep, vast. And as though man 
might come some day in the vanity of the subse- 



AMONG THE FOUNDATIONS. 137 

quent centuries and mock at the impulse or charac- 
ter of these men, they all died heroic deaths that 
the feeble critics of the nineteenth century might 
feel their own littleness when they should behold 
the thrilling ending of these lives. Paul was put to 
death in Rome. John was tortured and sent to die 
an exile. James was hurled from a battlement in 
Jerusalem and crushed to death. Simon Zelotes was 
put to death in Persia, where also Jude was tortured 
to the death. Matthew was slain by a mob in 
Abyssinia. Thomas was killed in Coromandel. Philip 
was hanged upon a pillar in Hierapolis. Andrew 
was crucified at Patraca, and James the Less in Asia. 
As for the one Name towering above all, He was 
crucified on Mount Calvary between two thieves. Into 
such holy hearts did God pour the truths, the hopes, 
the joys and sorrows of our religion. 



A PLEA FOE THE BETTER CLASSES. 



SERMON VIII. 
A PLEA FOR THE BETTER, CLASSES. 



"Neither do men put new wine into old bottles." — Matt. 9:17. 

A LL men are born to equal rights, but not to 
-*--^- equal conditions. The outcome of life is so 
affected by health, by industry, by virtue, by laws, 
by natural ability, by accidental association, that 
society can never be made up of men living in uni- 
form circumstances. As the bits of glass in the toy 
fall differently and make different forms, now a 
triangle and now an octagon, so the conditions of 
life fall out after a varied fashion, and place before 
us no two souls of one image. The Roman Church 
and the despotism of England transformed Ireland 
into an image of sorrow, and all her children are 
born into a sad career, in making which they had 
no voice. It is commonly rumored that some swift, 
secret couriers, stationed at relay points, rode and 
ran, and sailed, after the battle of Waterloo, and, 
reaching the stock market, laid the foundations of 



142 A PLEA FOR THE BETTER CLASSES. 

the Rothschild fortune. Thus out of a riding horse- 
man came a family that manages the money of a 
continent, and that continent Europe. Incidents thus 
may found a caste in society. Hence society is full 
of caste. Along comes a lad with more brains than 
is enjoyed by his brother, and while one Beethoven 
proudly signs himself " Land-owner," to keep the 
world from confounding him with his poor musical 
brother, the brother signs himself " Brain-owner," 
and the balance is fully struck. Thus out of the 
strange laboratory of nature issue two tribes, " land- 
owners," and "brain-owners," and then a third tribe 
that are neither. Very busy is this earth, all 
the while dividing its children up into parcels, say- 
ing to some of them " Take beauty ;" to others, 
" Take genius ;" to others, " Take money and go 
your way ;" and by divers paths, they all go away 
to the far country. In one of his poems Dr. Holmes 
passes beyond the visible influence of earth and finds 
a fatal hand reaching down out of the unseen and 
shaping destiny. 

From the same father's side, 

From the same mother's knee, 
One journeys toward a frozen tide, 

One to a peaceful sea. 

This verse, quoted only from vague memory, 



A PLEA FOR THE BETTER CLASSES. 143 

reminds us that unknown causes enter into the 
career of man, and, combining with known agencies, 
make earth a place where humanity falls into many 
shapes, and beats around against itself like the waves 
of chopped seas. As the world advances, as the 
unifying power of education and republicanism ad- 
vances and increases, the distinctions of society will 
not only diminish in quantity, but the quality will 
be less painful. The prayer of the Saviour, " That 
all may be one," is an ideal toward which all are to 
toil, but which will be fully overtaken only in the 
fields of Heaven. 

Here, then, the world lies to-day with different 
classes upon its surface, and even here in democratic 
America stand two classes side by side, the educated 
and the untaught. We need not recall the rich and 
the poor, the beautiful and the ugly, the high and 
the low by the verdict of gold, but only those two 
armies called the learned and the unlearned, for our 
remarks have reference only to those two multitudes. 
A hundred times at least in my life have I spoken 
on behalf of the slave in the cotton -field, the Indian 
in the forest, the masses in India and China, and the 
swarms of wretched ones in our streets. Hence you 
will grant me a swift forgiveness to-day if for once 
I shall enter a plea in behalf of people who, gifted 



144 A PLEA FOE THE BETTER GLASSES. 

with good sense by fate, have, by reading, and hear- 
ing, and reflection, added a little to the original 
moral momentum of their souls. This multitude is 
not large, but it is immensely powerful, and this 
multitude is daily expanding, and their power for 
good or ill upon a rapid increase. 

Each class of mankind needs its own peculiar 
treatment. When a new form of human soul comes 
along, a new school-house, new politics, a new relig- 
ion, must be made for this new soul. The laws of 
Persia would not be obeyed by Americans. Our 
upper classes would not tend a Roman theater. Our 
soldiers would not go into battle as the Persians 
went, with a driver and a lash behind each squad. 
As fast as new men come, their surroundings must 
become new, just as Paul, when a child saw as a 
child and spoke as a child, but passing into manhood 
he put away childish things. While a child, Paul 
saw the sky as a blue arch within a stone's throw 
of his hand, but when he became a man his mind 
pushed back the canopy and made it the far-off 
encampment of God. Thus, as a class of men or a 
whole age moves forward, the scenery changes as 
around a flying train, and what was passes away. 
Thus the Roman religion, with its temples, and 
candles, and holy coats, and with its pageants of 



A PLEA FOE TEE BETTER CLASSES. 145 

marching priests with gorgeous robes, fitted well the 
wants of an age when Roman, and Goth, and Vandal, 
were to be carried across from barbarism to civiliza- 
tion. As a child learns language first through the 
eye, by seeing the object represented by the word, 
and, indeed, as language itself began in the names of 
things that had length, breadth, and thickness, so 
Christianity passes through its materialized period 
with the individual or the age, and then swells out 
into spirituality, as the man or the time changes its 
need. 

Since, then, Christianity must be flexible in its 
method and doctrine, we all err perhaps in over- 
looking the upper, educated class and in devoting 
our whole time to the effort to fit religion to the 
great democratic populace. The genius of our 
country turns the attention of publicists (and the 
preacher too is a publicist) toward what is called 
the masses. The uprising of charity as a virtue 
makes us seek out the object of that great love. 
It has come to pass that we weep over nothing but 
a ragged orphan or a slave. The pulpit upbraids 
the rich, and defies the educated, and ridicules the 
scientific, and frantically declares for the outcast, the 
ignorant, the chimney-sweep, and the newsboy. It 
is not probable that the Church will overdo any 
10 



146 A PLEA FOB THE BETTER CLASSES. 

shape of benevoleuce. We would not abate its 
work or its prayer along any of these divine paths. 
But let us not forget that there is another class of 
human beings, educated, moral, often rich, and 
always powerful, who need some thought and some 
love from those .who pretend to be carrying the ark 
of the Lord along through the wilderness. If any 
one will look into the churches of the land of a 
Sunday he will find a wonderful scarcity of the 
intellectually great. But, if the same observer will 
visit the mission Sunday-schools, or will go 
to the meetings of the great evangelists toiling 
over the world, he will find throngs of what the 
world calls the middle or humbler class. This 
comes to pass because the religion of the day has 
been all shaped to suit them. There is a wonderful 
attractiveness to the multitude in some of the 
modern forms of evangelism. The month upon 
month of meetings, the simple exposition of simple 
passages of scripture, the thousands of anonymous 
requests for prayer, the wandering about of " Holi- 
ness Bands," composed of persons who have given 
up all for the Master, are religious phenonema 
that meet the need of many. At least let us 
suppose that some good is about to flow down from 
such fountains. But meanwhile what is the Church 



A PLEA FOB THE BETTER CLASSES. 147 

doing for that multitude of persons who need a 
Christianity of a different shape ? There are 
thousands who have become dissatisfied with the 
Adventists and with the " Holiness Bands," and 
with the domestic economy that prays for money 
and a barrel of flour, that supports life by prayer 
instead of by industry. There is a mighty throng 
of statesmen, of lawyers, of doctors, of scientific 
men, of readers and thinkers, who have quite 
deserted the church of the age, a throng mighty in 
their power over not only the present, but over the 
future. 

Not in the least should the zeal of the pulpit be 
abated toward the lower multitude, but toward the 
educated class it is high time there were flung out 
some kind of invitation that might touch their 
intellects and their very souls. 

It is very difficult indeed to state what should 
be done in this great crisis of religious affairs. It 
can not be denied that while upon one side a 
multitude is seen coming toward the sanctuary, a 
large and valuable company may be seen on the 
other side going away. This picture, to me at least, 
is so plainly seen that it assures me that the Church 
has come to a crisis. In such an hour many should 
speak, that by the mouth of many witnesses the 



148 A PLEA FOE THE BETTER CLASSES. 

truth may be established. I can submit only my 
own reflections. 

1. It is evident that only the least possible con- 
cession should ever be made to the humblest classes. 
As they should not be treated to poor music and a 
spectacular drama because they are unable to 
appreciate good music and the high histrionic art, 
so religion should never bend much downward, but 
should stand calm and divine upon its lofty 
mountain, and entice the multitude upward. It is 
marvelous how soon a crowd will rise to the level 
of its leader. Moses dashed to pieces the golden 
calf, and steadfastly lifted up the true God. In a 
few years the Israelites arose from the idol to the 
living Jehovah. There is a limit to the usefulness 
of the law of accommodation. There is a law of 
ideals which makes it necessary that each individual 
and each group of individuals should be held by 
the vision of something above self. In the career of 
Christianity only those leaders can conduct the 
Church to success who are able, and who are brave 
enough to stand above the people and to invite 
them to higher seats. The idea of a miraculous 
call into the ministry has let loose into the world 
hundreds of teachers who, instead of leading the 
people upward, have helped them back toward a 



A PLEA FOR THE BETTER CLASSES. 149 

superstition that would almost shame a monk of the 
dark ages. Many are now preaching what the}' call 
the Gospel, who possess only a highly-wrought 
emotional nature, and an extreme ignorance of the 
history and principles of religion. If the Church 
could realize that the only call to the ministry 
possible to be heard on earth is made up of common 
sense, learning, and piety, all joining into one invi- 
tation, great and substantial would be the religious 
progress of the land in the next generation. But 
as things now are, there are hundreds of agents 
busy in reducing Christianity down to the condition 
of a weak superstition. 

2. There should be every where confessed and 
promulgated a reform of doctrine. There are many 
noble men now carrying in their bosoms religious, 
even Christian, sentiments, who are still told that 
these feelings are not religion, but are only deceptive 
states of mind, blinding those who hold them to their 
utter depravity ; that by some new and strange man- 
ner (perhaps at some public meeting in the middle 
of Winter), these persons must become converted. 
Now I believe man's heart is changed by the Infinite 
Spirit, but I believe the Church has long erred by 
daring to decide upon the manner by which, or the 
person to whom, such new life comes. It should 



150 A PLEA FOB THE BETTER GLASSES. 

seem that the Church can wait only for the moral 
life, and finding in the soul the fear of God and a 
love toward Christ, must assume that there the 
transforming power of God has been. A righteous 
man must be confessed to be a converted man. The 
Church possesses no analysis by which it can open 
a heart and find that morality is not regeneration, 
and that the prayers and hymns of a " moralist" do 
not issue from the Holy Spirit, who, imaged as a 
dove, flies back and forth forever over the ocean of 
soul. There are hundreds of men in this city and 
every where, who, loving the New Testament, and 
bowing in reverence before its central character, and 
living an upright life, are yet viewed as heirs of 
perdition, because they have not passed through an 
" experience" defined by mistaken fathers, who 
seemed to be able to analyze the workings of the 
spirit both of man and of God. In closing its doors 
against "mere moralists," in waiting for only those 
who should come through the gate of miracle, 
though the tumult of an " experience," the Church 
has shut out a large upper class, and has not only 
deprived Itself of power, but has done an injustice 
toward some of the noblest members of society. 
The presence of the religious sentiment and an up- 
right life are the only evidences of conversion we 



A PLEA FOR THE BETTER CLASSES. 151 

dare expect. Hence we of the Church should always 
hail every upright, religious man as a brother, not 
simply by language, or country, or by humanity, but 
a brother by the sweet association of religion. In 
the former centuries it was well enough to combine 
inseparably salvation and forms, salvation and bap- 
tism, or salvation and a church, or salvation and a 
certain " experience," for then all were ready to 
believe any thing, and the more ceremony there was 
the more welcome the religion. Even such a proud 
and lofty king as Louis XIV., said in his dying 
moments, " I have done whatever my Church has 
told me to do. I know nothing of Christian duty 
except as directed by my bishops. If I have done 
wrong the blame rests upon them." In all former 
times it mattered not if Heaven and trifling forms 
were bound together. But in our age there has 
come to the surface a new class of persons. Issuing 
from a new world of literature, of developed reason, 
of deep, sober reflection, they demanded a Christian- 
ity purified. They will not, like Louis XIV., say, 
" I have done whatever my priest has told me to 
do ;" but, cutting loose from these human masters, 
and passing out into the new world of light and 
liberty, they will place their hand upon their heart, 
and, looking up to God, say, " What wouldst Thou 



152 A PLEA FOB THE BETTER GLASSES. 

have me to do?" These great children of earth will 
no longer suffer you and me to define conversion for 
them, nor to philosophize for them about free-will or 
decrees, nor about " baptismal regeneration," but, 
standing in the presence of an Infinite God, and in 
the more visible presence of Jesus Christ, they will 
push away all our little vestments, and candles, and 
formulas, and will, with sublime power, say with the 
Saviour, " Blessed are the pure in heart." The time 
is rapidly coming when none of us will dare contra- 
dict such a profession of religion. The government 
of our land, the church of our land, the homes of 
our land, will be compelled at last to seek shelter 
in an upper multitude whose conscience, and culture, 
and doctrine, of an upright life shall become the 
best anchor of society. A cultivated gentleman 
remarked to me recently, " When you draw up a 
creed for your ' Central Church ' I hope you will 
make righteousness a very prominent doctrine." 

But we can not delay longer upon this point. 
Let me repeat that Christianity must study anew 
the times, and, if possible, must confess the upright 
man to be the converted man, and must gather into 
its sanctuary thousands whose religion has been 
simplified by the generations of reflection that have 
separated the true from the false, and the valuable 
from the foolish and the incidental. 



A PLEA FOR THE BETTER CLASSES. 153 

3. The educated class demand a modification of the 
popular religion to this extent, that it must be made 
to meet the wants of this life. As men progress in 
education and thought, earth with all its interests 
becomes larger instead of smaller. The " ever 
unrolling web of life " expanding out into youth, 
manhood, womanhood, into homes by the hillside, 
into cities by the lake and sea, into nations covering 
continents, into vast literatures and arts, grows more 
wonderful as the human mind gathers power to 
grasp the great spectacle. Had we all ten times the 
power to perceive the greatness of our world, we 
should weep to-day over the sublimity of this great 
wave of human life. To us so far away from the 
planet Jupiter it twinkles only as a large dew-drop. 
But could we be carried to within a few miles of its 
shores we should be filled with amazement at the 
gigantic world into which that twinkling star should 
expand. Perhaps to our eye would come the vision 

of fields. 

Where everlasting Spring abides, 
And never fading flowers, 

and to our ear would come, as to the Italian poet 
in paradise, "the rolling melody of bird-song." 
Thus, could our minds be so aroused by some divine 
inspiration that they might draw near this flowing 



154 A PLEA FOB THE BETTER CLASSES. 

stream of earthly life and see it in all its wonder 
of to-day and to-morrow, our hearts would almost 
break in presence of the scene. A public man 
recently wrote to a friend, " Oh, that I had been 
born twenty-five years sooner or twenty-five years 
later, that either I might have died before this 
generation had come, or else that now I might hope 
to go with it onward to its greater hours." 

Thus, as the mind advances, the proportions of 
this life increase, and that which was a twinkling 
dew-drop to childhood becomes to the higher intel- 
lect a marvelous world bearing an Infinite God and 
an unfathomable humanity on its great bosom. 

Now, up to the very present the popular religion 
has too much taught the multitude to sever all the 
ties of earth and wait for Heaven to come. This 
suits the slave, for he longs to escape bondage; and 
suits the poor, for to him Heaven is riches. The 
religion of the humbler classes is always a melan- 
choly. Their hymns are wails of desolation; their 
sermons a philosophy not of life but of death. The 
time has come for a new phase of Christianity. 
We need no longer, and never did need, the fanatical 
teachings that declare the world about to end, and 
that nothing human can ever carry mankind forward 
to good government, and good homes, and high 



A PLEA FOR THE BETTER GLASSES. 155 

personal character. Those who have dared teach 
such a doctrine have only separated those who 
loved God and the Christ from the sacred interests 
of earth ; have made them treat with contempt the 
polls where the votes are cast which shape the 
destiny of the state ; made them despise the men 
who make laws and study justice ; made them treat 
with disdain the arts that refine, the literature that 
enlightens, the pleasures that cheer. Among the 
doctrines to be discarded let us rank first all this 
Adventism. There are tens of thousands of Chris- 
tians who have taken no part in this world's 
stupendous business, but while their fellow men 
have been toiling amid the duties and the sorrows 
of society, they have consulted the ambiguous words 
of poetry to find whether or not this is the year 
when the earth is to pass away in whirlwind, cloud, 
and fire. It will answer for the poor African to 
feel that earth is not his dwelling-place. He may 
sing a song woven out of the chains that once held 
him and his children, 

Oh, swing low, sweet chariot, 
Oh, leave me not behind; 

for to him death is a chariot passing over a 
flowery road drawn by horses of light. And so out 



156 A PLEA FOE THE BETTER CLASSES. 

of the persecutions and desolations of the former 
centuries, where a million people went hungry and 
barefoot that one king or one prince might be 
arrayed in splendor; out of the persecutions that 
made religion mean martyrdom, — came a melancholy 
which we pity and forgive. But here our charity 
terminates, and now we behold a period when a 
new world lying before the Church asks it to put 
aside its indifference and gird itself for the welfare 
of this great encampment on the shores of time. 
The lawyers, the statesmen, the patriots, the philan- 
thropists, all demand a religion that shall blend 
with these days of earth, and help it in its liberty, 
in its law, in its arts, its letters, its honors, its 
pleasures. These noble ones believe in immortality, 
but they believe that a good earth is the best 
stepping stone to Heaven. They believe God loved 
earth, or He would not have made it and have 
caused to pass over it such a procession of souls. 
They believe that the children of this world will 
be called one by one to eternity, but they believe 
that for thousands of years yet earth will remain 
the arena of human life, and that as a mother 
lovingly provides for her children, though she may 
be on the morrow to leave them forever, so all noble 
souls will toil for mankind present and to come, 



A PLEA FOR THE BETTER CLASSES. 157 

though there be a grave for the toiler near by in 
the grass. Here upon earth God is sitting upon a 
throne of ages, and by our deeds done here we 
weave for ourselves the chaplets of immortality. 
Hence, man demands a religion that shall be full of 
faithfulness to these years, a religion which utters to 
earth the poet's words, with high adaptation: 

" Oh, grand world, being about to die, we salute thee." 

Morituri salutamus, 

" Ye halls in whose seclusion and repose, 
Phantoms of fame like exhalations rose 
And vanished, we who are about to die 
Salute you; earth, and air, and sea, and sky, 
And the Imperial Sun that scatters down 
His sovereign splendor upon grove and town." 

Thus, must the Christianity of our day refit itself 
to the new era. It can count no longer upon a 
childhood that loves forms, nor upon a public 
ignorance that drinks in all doctrines. It should 
not remain neglectful of the fact that there is 
rising up a class powerful in education and in 
reason and in virtue, a class that does not fill our 
jails, but that makes our laws, that sits upon the 
judge's bench, that shapes our literature, that molds 
our social, life, a class which neither clergyman nor 



158 A PLEA FOB THE BETTER GLASSES. 

theologian will dare pass by in his effort to plant 
Christ in the human soul. To them Christianity 
must come in a wonderful simplicity, in all the 
moral splendor of Jesus Christ ; come chanting the 
beatitudes ; come not longing, like the African, to 
escape earth, but come with the impulse of heroes 
loving the education of duty done, and feeling that 
the best immortality is that which springs up out of 
the most honorable tomb. The best resurrection 
awaits him who dies, not as a worm, but as a hero. 



THE BIBLE AXD THE COMMON 

PEOPLE. 



SERMON IX. 
THE BIBLE AND THE COMMON PEOPLE. 



" The entrance of Thy Word giveth light."— Psalms 119 : 130. 

rTlHE Sunday having come upon which this con- 

-*- gregation has been accustomed to contribute 

toward a wider circulation of the Bible, my remarks 

this morning will be upon " The Bible and the 

Humbler Classes." The Bible Society does not 

pretend to exhaust its monej 7 and solicitude upon 

those who stand high in either riches or education* 

Its work is among the lowly, and hence we may 

well inquire into the relations of the Book to the 

people. This Church has, in that ten years of its 

life known to me, shown a deep interest in this 

branch of Christian beneficence, and may I not hope 

that its last contribution under this pastorate may 

be marked by the old generosity and by the old 

faith in the Book of books? 

Inasmuch as the Bible is destined soon to be 

omitted from the list of books taught in the public 
11 



162 THE BIBLE AND THE COMMON PEOPLE. 

schools, the work of disseminating the truths of the 
Scriptures will soon devolve wholly upon the 
Church, and this fact will make the Bible Society a 
greater instrument of good in the future than it 
has ever been in the past. We can not hope much 
from any compulsory reading of morals. While the 
Bible held its place in the schools by power of 
conscience, or by a cheerful public consent, all was 
well. Its lessons fell on good ground like seed 
sown upon rich soil in the sunshine of Spring. 
When these divine lessons at last need the strong 
arm of law, and of doubtful or unjust law, to 
sustain them in public schools, then they cease to 
fall upon the heart as dew from Heaven, but come 
to the ear more as orders from a powerful despot 
whose potency is to be found in the police. In a 
New England village, two weeks ago, in a school 
where half were Catholic and half were Protestant 
children, the village schoolmaster and village priest 
fell to fighting in the school room as to the reading 
or the not reading of the Sermon on the Mount. 

It is said that much of German infidelity has 
come from an enforced religion. Compulsory Bibles 
and compulsory prayers have never proven a valu- 
able element in the spread of religion. Much less 
can they prove valuable in a land whose great 



THE BIBLE AND THE COMMON PEOPLE. 163 

motto is liberty, and of which liberty religious 
freedom is a most conspicuous part. An enforced 
reading of the Bible would only make its pages 
absolutely hateful to Catholic and Jew and skeptic, 
and thus as legal power should come to the support 
of the book, its intrinsic moral power would pass 
away. For many reasons the Bible will be withdrawn 
from the public schools as rapidly as any religious 
opposition may demand such a withdrawal, and in a 
few years the Church will remain the chief moral 
hope of the country. 

Religion, from its very nature, must work its way 
forward only by love. Its power lies not in legis- 
latures, but in persuasion, and the more gently the 
Bible comes to people's homes and to the children, 
the more divine will the book appear. 

Among the peaceful agents in the instruction of 
the humbler classes we must to-day mention the 
American Bible Society. The society is composed 
of all the denominations of Protestants, and it 
distributes the book without note or comment. 
There is in such a society something broad that 
ought to captivate the heart of this congregation 
that glories in broadness, and that cordially hates 
the fog that hangs over the low coast of religious 
sectarianism. 



164 THE BIBLE AND THE COMMON PEOPLE. 

1. Permit me to remind you, first, that the cold- 
ness toward the Scriptures now existing in the world 
is limited to certain classes. There are thousands of 
scientific minds who have been led by their studies 
to feel that there is a discord between the Book of 
Revelation and the Book of Nature. In this dilemma 
they cling to their idol, nature, and look with 
contempt upon the book of paper and ink. Not 
being able to serve two masters, and assuming that 
the masters disagree, they naturally confess their 
allegiance to the world of hill and vale, and ocean 
and rock, and air and light; and neglect the world 
of St. John, and St. Paul, and Magdalen, and Christ. 
What causes may have led to this defection on the 
part of science we can not here inquire. We may 
accept of the defection as a fact, as a temporary 
fact, and thus pass it by. 

2. There is a second sedition or rebellion existing 
among the more highly educated, be they scientific, 
or metaphysical, or philosophic, or simply well- 
informed minds. This rebellion against the Bible is 
very extensive, and is, perhaps, somewhat on the 
increase. It has come in its wide and sad extent 
not from any fault of the Scriptures themselves, but 
from the bad company the Bible has been compelled 
to keep in its journey along through the generations. 



THE BIBLE AXD THE COMMON PEOPLE. 165 



Not only is a man known by the company he keeps, 
but all things and all men are exposed to the good 
or ill of association. God alone can look through 
incidents or accidents and see the intrinsic worth 
beyond. The human mind can not penetrate the 
universe, but it must look at the externals and there 
locate its love or hate. The New Testament has 
been compelled to keep some very bad company in 
its day. It had to live awhile with Augustine, who 
was as much Pagan as Christian, and who was as 
obscure as midnight. It suffered from partnership 
with Tertullian, and then from the long dark ages 
which taught all the follies possible to human imagi- 
nation, and quoted God's word in their support; and 
then from even Luther and Calvin, who added as 
much of the false and the terrible to the Bible as 
they drew from it of the true and beautiful. Thus 
all the way of its march the divine book has suffered 
from the badness of the company it has kept. At 
best the Bible would have had a difficult task, that 
of winning the love of wicked hearts. Under more 
favorable circumstances it would have met with 
many an enemy; but when, to the natural unpopu- 
larity of a book that commands virtue one adds the 
cruelties of conduct and the monstrosities of doctrine 
which the olden time deduced from the Testaments, 



166 THE BIBLE AND THE COMMON PEOPLE. 



it is scarcely to be wondered at that a widespread 
doubt came into the world whether such a volume 
ever came from the wise or merciful One. God's 
Bible and man's Bible are very different books. 

3. Having thus confessed the existence of two 
large classes of skeptics, classes that may he called the 
scientific and the moral skeptics, let us now mark a 
more cheering fact, namely, that there is a vast mul- 
titude of persons to whom these clouds of doubt and 
storms of wrath have not come. There are millions 
of good citizens living in good quiet homes, leading 
industrious and often sorrowful lives, to whom the 
Bible comes in that moral beauty which it wore when 
the world was young. 

We can not but assume that the modern revolt 
against the Bible is unjust. It results from an 
imaginary antagonism between science and religion, 
and from the unwillingness of men to distinguish 
between the Roman Church and the simple Church 
of Christ, or between the Institutes of Calvin and 
the four Gospels. I believe this rebellion is so badly 
founded that it will soon pass away. Having this 
feeling, may we not rejoice that there are millions in 
this land who have not yet come to this scientific 
or intellectual doubt, and to whom the Bible comes 
as a blessed volume from God to man ? Perhaps by 



THE BIBLE AND THE COMMON PEOPLE. 167 

the time this throng of common people shall have 
reached a higher intellectual condition, the present 
public unbelief will have passed away, and a har- 
mony will have been found between learning and 
the Christian faith. Such a harmony will come. 
The Bible may be a closed book to many modern 
philosophers and casuists, but to the multitude at 
large it lies an open book, with a light better than 
than that of the sun upon its page. In fact, in 
order to learn the value of the Bible, we must repair 
to the multitude, for they make up that vast 
audience to whom its words were spoken, and they 
make up a jury that interprets the Word without 
prejudice. If the Bible had been composed for the 
highest order of purely intellectual men, then they 
would be indeed the only commentators we should 
dare consult. In seeking for the meaning of Puffen- 
dorff, we may willingly consult all the learned mor- 
alists, and one may well read a learned commentator 
upon a learned Blackstone ; but when one comes to 
read letters from his mother or his friend, or the 
poems of Cowper or Burns, he may dispense with 
Augustine and Calvin, and may go to the writings 
in his own mind and soul. The Bible is God's word 
to the people, and the average truth and impulse 
which the people secure from that book will be the 



168 THE BIBLE AND THE COMMON PEOPLE. 

only truth worthy of being called a Biblical creed. 
As the modern commentators upon Shakspeare are 
loading that bard down with ideas of which his brain 
never dreamed^ and are now making that great poet 
a wareroom into which all kinds of specialists are 
emptying their loads of discovery, and invention, and 
plunder, so the long line of theologians have made 
the Bible the helpless victim of all their marvelous 
theories and fabrications. Upon the Bible the high 
churchman hangs his vestments and sets his candles. 
There the Catholic finds his pope and his hloy 
water. There the schoolmen found the bases of 
their debates about the size and weight of angels. 
There the old students found fifty confessions of 
faith. There Luther found the nothingness of man's 
free agency. There Calvin found his five points and 
the death warrant of Servetus ; and there, in a word, 
the world's wise men have found all imaginable 
notions from the damnation of an infant to the 
hanging of a witch. 

Frederick the Great is reported to have said that 
if he had a province which he wished to punish for 
disloyalty, he would suffer it to be governed a few 
years by some abstract philosophers. We do not 
know why one may not apply this anecdote more 
widely, and declare that if the world wishes to get 



THE BIBLE AND THE COMMON PEOPLE. 169 



wholly clear of its Bible it should leave it a little 
longer to the tender mercy of the theologians. It is 
evidence of the divineness of the book that it has 
survived the ravages of all these ancient and modern 
schoolmen. 

With the great public heart for its interpreter, 
that book stands to-day all glorious in its kindness 
and light. The common people come to it not with 
their elaborate systems, but with their sins that 
need forgiveness, and their sorrows that need a cure. 
The theoretic scholars approach the Bible as critics, 
desiring to build up a theory or tear down one, and 
the skeptical world at large reads it only as a 
lawyer weighs evidence ; but what we call the 
humbler classes, scattered all through the wide land, 
living here in a cabin, there in a cottage, or acting 
as servants of the rich, or sailing in ships upon the 
sea, or swinging the axe in the forest, come to the 
Book at times because the issues of life and death 
are there. By the time this numerous multitude 
shall have reached a higher intellectual development, 
the present form of skepticism will have passed 
away, perhaps, and there will be thousands of 
citizens who will never have suffered from its blight. 
The basis of doubt is always changing. Unbelief 
attaches itself now to scientific inquiry, now to 



170 THE BIBLE AND TEE COMMON PEOPLE. 

historical research, now to internal defects of morals; 
the stream is always changing its bed like the 
Mississippi, leaving dry to-day the shore against 
which it was pouring a flood on yesterday. Back of 
this changing criticism the great book re-appears 
again, not only not injured, but improved, and the 
common people will find the Scriptures richer and 
better at last, without themselves having passed 
through the furnace by which the Word became 
purified. It is a comforting thought that there are 
thousands in the land who are reading the Bible 
away from the scientific and theological confusion of 
tongues. 

To the multitude the sacred volume tells a 
straight-forward story. They see in it the picture 
of the human heart in all its sinfulness and in all 
its divineness, too. They see the dark destiny of 
sin, and the bright destiny of virtue. One is called 
hell, the other heaven. They do not descend into 
particulars about the region of sorrow or the region 
of joy. They feel that the one is to be dreaded, 
the other loved. There on the open page lies the 
doctrine of repentance, far more impressive in Peter 
and in Magdalen than in any system of abstract 
doctrine. There lies the doctrine of faith in Christ 
sweeter in the group around Jesus, in the apostles 



THE BIBLE AND THE COMMON PEOPLE. 171 

and martyrs, than in any confession of any Church. 
There in the Gospels lives and moves and dies and 
rises again the Redeemer, in a charm and power to 
which the learning of commentators can add nothing. 
In fact, one may perhaps be glad that there is an 
army of earth's inhabitants, old and young, white 
and black, hidden away in the obscurity which 
ignorance and poverty bring, to whom human wisdom 
in the form of " eternally begotten," and "eternally 
proceeding," and "limited atonement," and "ina- 
bility," has never come, but to whose hearts the 
Bible tells its simple story as a mother talks to her 
confiding child. When learning so mistakes its 
calling and becomes only the overgrown egotism of 
vain hearts, then ignorance is bliss. Much of 
modern theology is only great banks of cloud 
rolling up between the human family and the moral 
sun. As the damp vales of earth and the bitter 
ocean are always exhaling vapors that keep our sky 
clouded and that expose the beautiful earth to 
perpetual storm, so from the intellect, in its extrava- 
gant vanity, clouds arise that hide both Creator and 
Saviour from the upturned faces of mankind. Upon 
Goat Island in the Niagara, upon a Sunday, years 
ago, I found, hidden away at the root of a tree, a 
servant from the hotel, reading in his Testament 



172 THE BIBLE AND THE COMMON PEOPLE. 

about the crucifixion. He was an old emancipated 
slave. Upon being questioned as to whether he 
loved that passage above all, he said he always cried 
over the idea that for even black men a Christ 
should have died. I wonder whether any of the 
formulas of men about that death could ever entice 
from a slave's heart such a tribute of weeping. 
Here a humble fugitive slave came to fulfill the 
image of Tennyson : 

All subtile thought, all curious fears, 
Borne down by gladness so complete, 

He bows, he bathes the Saviour's feet 
With costly spikenard and with tears. 

Thus, doubt it not, the common people glean 
from the sacred page the very golden sheaves which 
the Lord let fall for man. They find them in all 
the wide field reaching from Abraham to St. John. 
Not the entire multitude will thus be found extract- 
ing honey from this great field of flowers. Man 
will never move in a solid phalanx toward any 
form of good. Many are called but few are chosen. 
The downward path is always broad, the upward 
path narrow. Facilis descensus averni. Hence, 
when I speak of the blessings which the common 
people draw from the Bible I am not dreaming of 
an unbroken host poring over a divine book, but of 



THE BIBLE AND THE COMMON PEOPLE. 173 

many souls, many indeed, which in youth and in 
old age, in joy and in sorrow, in darkness and in 
light, are at times taking up the Bible to trace in it 
the path of hope for time and eternity. Could you 
call all these together this day from all the corners 
of our land, and from the lonely ships on our seas, 
they would come in such a mnltitude, and so 
pressing the Book to their hearts, that even were 
you an infidel you would bless God that so many 
souls were drawing so much happiness from the two 
Testaments. The hardest heart might weep for joy 
that so many had found infinite peace. 

It is wonderful (at least to myself) what use the 
unlearned make even of the enigmatical pages of 
Isaiah and Ezekiel and the Apocalypse of St. John. 
In the humble house of the freeman and the slave 
you will find the Bible soiled and worn where Eze- 
kiel parades his images of the Almighty, and where 
John paints the catastrophe of earth. What means 
this, that the children of ignorance are drawing 
nourishment from pages from which the calmer 
minds of both the skeptical and the faithful have 
often turned silently away? It must mean that true 
religion is an emotion of the soul rather than a 
clear action of the intellect. Religion is an uprising 
of the heart. A religious newspaper of this city 



174 THE BIBLE AND THE COMMON PEOPLE. 

which two years ago exhausted all its columns each 
week against an "emotional religion," did last week 
so far forget itself as to state that "Around the 
Mercy Seat the heart always rises above the mists 
of the head," and over some Unitarian hymns it 
expressed the hope that "May there be more of this 
rising above the narrow house of the intellect toward 
the Son of Righteousness." Religion, worship, 
prayer, is a deep feeling rolling over the heart, as 
a wave upon the shore. Hence, amid the indefinite 
ideas of Ezekiel and St. John the intellect indeed 
does not see clearly, but the soul is borne along by 
its own consciousness of the grand and even the 
thrilling in religion. Mathematics alone speaks 
exact words. Poetry and prophecy come with a 
wonderful vagueness, but the human heart flies to 
them because it is not information it seeks, but a 
new light or shadow for the heart. No one may 
declare what Ezekiel saw in his vision of an advanc- 
ing Providence moving upon wheels within wheels 
and with wings of cherubim, but toward the scene 
the human spirit turns and feels that somewhere in 
the great cloud of mystery is the being of God. So 
neither the learned nor the unlearned know what 
definite ideas lay in the mind of John when he 
wrote out his great dream, but yet the poor and the 



THE BIBLE AND THE COMMON PEOPLE. 175 

humble repair to his page because as they read it 
the great mystery of immortality springs up afresh 
in their hearts, and to their ears comes the voice of 
harpers harping upon harps, and through their spirits 
roll the thunders of eternity. Music is not the only 
indefinite art. Music is almost matchless in its 
power to awaken the slumbering feelings of the 
soul. It has no definite language. The same piece 
will carry new life to one and will seem like a 
dance of happy spirits, and to another will come as 
in the pensiyeness of a dying hour, and will cause 
to come before us the faces of the loved dead, and 
will make one wish to be with the dead beyond the 
tomb in the grass. Music is an urn into which 
each heart empties its own self. But it is not alone 
in this. Religion is its sister, only more gifted in 
mind and soul. Hence, into the words of St. John, 
into his graceful vases of language the heart of the 
humblest man may go and pour its own hopes and 
sorrows, and while } T et upon the shores of earth in 
body may be carried away to paradise. The Apoca- 
lypse is only the solemn music of futurity sounding 
for us all. The words are indistinct, but we 
remember now that the most impressive music is 
written wholly without words, leaving the soul to 
wander off into realms where no language has ever 



176 THE BIBLE AND THE COMMON PEOPLE. 

gone. In the best hours of the soul language 
becomes vague or else wholly perishes. 

Let me conclude by re-stating the thought that 
the Bible Society may, if it will rise to its work, 
reach a multitude to which the chilling unbelief of 
our day has not yet come ; that this multitude, 
living now in obscurity, will come forward and be 
the children of a deeper faith when we children of 
doubt shall have become dust ; and this multitude 
can gather from the Bible itself a better idea of 
Jesus Christ afad of the whole way of life than they 
can gather from the elaborate systems of man ; and 
that before their strangely-made hearts, hearts full 
of responsive religion, even the prophecies and the 
Apocalypse turn into prayers, and fears, and longings, 
and hopes, lifting their spirits upward as by a 
melody written sublimely, but without words. 



CHRISTIAN HEROISM. 



SERMON X. 
CHRISTIAN HEROISM. 



"Go ye, therefore, and teach all nations." — Matt. 28:19. 

fTHHE approaching meeting of the American Board, 
-^- a meeting which honors always the city where 
its sessions are held, should, for the week, at least, 
make the subject of missions a theme of reflection. 
We are all by nature sluggish of intellect. The 
easiest path is the favorite. Idleness is one of the 
shapes assumed by our original sin. To think 
correctly is not the only act that depends upon 
long effort, but to be willing to think at all, is a 
state of mind that comes by civilization, and not by 
nature. When a man has become so willing to 
think that he will not dismiss with a shudder any 
of the great or minor questions of the day, he has 
made no little progress away from the degradation 
of Adam's fall. All public speakers have at times 
seen the hearts of their audiences sink when the 
theme of remark has been announced, all the 



180 CHRISTIAN HEROISM. 

multitude in the seats feeling that they could not 
endure to climb such a hill of dead argument as lay 
before them. But this sinking, this fainting of the 
soul in presence of mental work, is not the result 
of human greatness, but human littleness, it being 
the struggle of the old " natural man" to find still 
in the nineteenth century the sleep and languor 
which so delighted him when the world was young 
and the day and night were not vexed by any logic 
or any art. It will require in us all great effort 
and great will-power to enable us to study betimes 
the varied phenomena of man's life. As merchants 
we are willing to study man's commerce at home 
and abroad; as doctors we are willing to read the 
medical journals of the old and new worlds ; as 
politicians we are ready to mark what the papers 
said yesterday, and what this or that caucus did 
East or West; as ladies of fashion all are willing to 
study the latest forms of raiment, and to combine 
desire with the study; but to get out of these 
channels, and while merchants to care for law, or 
while doctors to care for theology, or while lawyers 
to give any thought to a missionary, this is the 
crucial test which few can survive. It should be 
the deliberate and stubborn purpose of each mind 
to free itself from the infatuation of a hobby, and 



CHRISTIAN HEROISM. 181 

to stand forth in the breadth of the world. Like 
the ancient accused of a selfishness, we should reply, 
" I am human, and no human interest is beyond the 
range of my heart." 

The greatness of earth is many-sided. Be your 
own calling great indeed, law or science, or art or 
merchandise, the world is immensely large outside 
your calling, and it would be sad should you die 
without having seen something of that vast beyond. 
It has been thought the calamity of Moses that he 
was not permitted to pass over into the better land; 
but there are millions in our day who can show a 
sadder record, for instead of rising to the top of 
Pisgah and stealing a sweet prospect of the widen- 
ing world, they remain at the mountain's base and 
die without even a glimpse of "the sweet fields 
arrayed in living green.*' The tears of pity shed 
for Moses would well be distributed over the crowd 
that does not enjoy even a Pisgah view of far-off 
things. 

Assuming, therefore, that we should struggle to 
get away from the narrowness that cares for only 
one thing, and from the inclination of barbarism to 
pass life in sleep, let us confess that the missionary 
movements of the Christian era are a fact that 
demands the attention of student and ordinary 



182 CHRISTIAN HEROISM. 

citizen and philanthropist. A material age will daily 
invite us away from such lines of reflection. It 
asks us to study the strata in the ground and the 
stars in the sky; asks us to find the shores of old 
lakes and the craters of extinct volcanoes; asks us 
to gather the bones of fossil birds and fish, and 
store up a cabinet of shells out of which some 
worms died a million years ago; but it heeds little 
the men that have sailed all stormy seas to carry 
love and light to their fellow pilgrims in this vale. 
Science is often full of cruelty. It studies the little 
things of the universe, counts the birds and the 
trees, measures the footprints of the great mammals 
that beat around in the forests that afterward made 
our coal, weighs the fossil tusks and teeth of extinct 
mastodons, but looks coldly toward the ship that 
carried St. Paul about, and toward the block where 
the blood was drawn from his heart. To science 
the bark canoe and the stone tomahawk of the 
savage are things greater and more charming than 
the pleading at Mars Hill or the movements of the 
apostles. 

All the facts of the earth are impressive and 
valuable, and at the feet of natural science we may 
all cast garlands of good will, but it is with ideas 
as Paul says it is wdth bodies: there are ideas 



CHRISTIAN HEROISM. 183 

terrestrial and ideas celestial, and the glory of the 
terrestrial is one and the glory of the celestial is 
another. There is one kind of flesh of man, another 
flesh of beasts, another of birds ; and so there is 
one glory of the sun, and another glory of the 
moon. In the realm of ideas there is a glory on all 
sides, a beautiful, captivating glory ; but the glory 
of the birds and the fishes is one, and the glory of 
a Xavier, or a Duff, or a Judson is another. Dear 
to us all, both as a study and as an inspiration, 
should be the lives of men who helped Christianity 
and all our civilization when it lay helpless in the 
midst of savages. When the storm may have 
occurred that changed the old ocean into prairies, or 
which transformed forests into beds of coal, is a 
question interesting indeed, but not so vital, so 
sublime, as the study of that awful tempest of 
destruction and creation that gave us Christ and His 
ardent followers. The penitence of Magdalen, the 
self-denial of the poor widow, the kindness of St. 
John, are stories that have affected the human race 
more than it has been affected by botany, chemistry, 
and astronomy. As of all things upon earth the soul 
is the greatest, as " there is nothing great in the 
world but man, and nothing great in man but his 
soul," according to the confession of Sir William 



184 CHRISTIAN HEROISM. 

Hamilton, hence there can be no study higher than 
the reflection over the atmosphere in which the soul 
lives and advances in its marvelous career. To look 
out in the evening toward the West and see the 
saffron ether poured out of invisible urns, is only 
one-half as sublime an act of the spirit as the 
retrospect of the heart that looks back and sees 
that atmosphere of human love and truth that 
rolled down upon the world from the great 
hearts of Jesus and His missionary children. As 
when the ministering priest at the altar used, in 
Aaron's day, to wave the burning censer until the 
colored smoke and the delicious perfume filled the 
whole temple, and from the fretted windows floated 
out toward Heaven, so Paul, and Peter, and James, 
and John, standing afar off at the holy altar, have 
swung their lighted vessels to and fro, until we, in 
this remote century, are enveloped by the pillar of 
cloud and fire, and to-day breathe in the sweet- 
scented air. 

St. Paul, Xavier, Judson! These three names 
will stand for a class, and from one we may learn 
all. QAb uno disce omnes^) The splendor of learning 
and the temptations of office and fame counted 
nothing to Paul's arithmetic after he met the great 
Christ. After that meeting at the gates of Damas- 



CHRISTIAN HEROISM. 185 

cus, Paul, like William Hamilton, saw nothing 
valuable upon earth but man, and nothing great in 
man but his soul. Paul passed from the career of a 
harsh ruler, or rather brutal underling, over to that 
unbounded charity that pities all, and loves all, and 
helps all. The Jewish nation was too limited to 
satisfy his love. He became the apostle to the 
Gentiles because the Jews were only a little sect. 
The Gentiles were a great world, hundreds of 
millions strong. Paul is the first being in history, 
after Jesus Christ, that took into his love the human 
race. The rest of the human history is uncheered 
by any instance of a self-denial that had all man 
for its object. Some of the Greeks wrote about the 
oneness of man, and one of them boasted that he 
was a "citizen of the world." But the theory of 
nobleness found its earliest realization in Judea. 
The Greeks loved their own state to such a degree 
that citizens thought it a matter of reproach to visit 
any outside land. To the polite Athenian foreign 
travel was a disgrace, unless the journey were made 
on some business account. To go abroad was to 
confess the imperfection of home. That magnificent 
breadth of brain and affection that grasps a whole 
human race, bond and free, high and low, is first 
seen in the great missionary to the Gentiles. All 



186 CHRISTIAN HEROISM. 

the elements of human greatness were visible in 
Paul. The insignificance of his body and whole 
presence perhaps made him concentrate, even from 
boyhood, upon the work of mental development. 
The gates of fashionable life and pleasure were 
closed, and hence the greater flow of life through 
the gates of the spirit. When a man stood up in 
the physique and health of an Apollo, the games, 
the general pride of life, came into daily conflict 
with great mental progress and with the highest 
ends of being. Nature compelled Paul to pursue an 
intellectual life, for it closed against him the voices 
of pleasure and the flattery of society. His thorn 
was not in the flesh, but his whole body was a 
thorn in the soul. The body is generally the 
decoration of the mind : his was the mind's mortifi- 
cation. At last Paul must have been a rare 
spectacle of soul standing upon its own mind alone. 
The infidels of the day ridiculed his personal 
appearance. He was of low stature and stoop- 
shouldered ; his forehead bald and his nose crooked 
as though it had been broken. He was so delicate 
that much of the time in his missionary travels he 
was almost blind with headache. In Lucian and 
Jerome, enemy and friend, you will find the 
evidence that the great soul of the apostle was set 



CHBISTIAX HEROISM. 187 

among thorns of the flesh. But God's roses bloom 
among thorns. 

It is wonderful that the people received with so 
much affection a man so unprepossessing. And vet 
no man that has ever journeyed upon earth ever 
found in his fellows a deeper friendship. Paul him- 
self says that, notwithstanding his infirmity, he was 
received "as though an angel from God." The 
explanation, after all, is easy. The heart and mind 
make up the man. A great cause acting in the 
soul illumines the face and sheds a halo around the 
body that transforms it into angelic outline. Thus 
Paul moved around transfigured by his grand charity 
and piety; and as, in a certain condition, Heaven's 
light on the horizon takes up the village on the 
shore and transforms it into palaces in the upper 
air, so there is a condition of virtue and love often 
in man that will make a homely face radiant, and 
make the life and memory of a Paul too vast and 
beautiful to be caught upon a page of history. In 
the holy atmosphere of missions Paul was trans- 
figured. 

Look far onward in Church history and behold 
Francis Xavier, "the apostle of the Indies." Let 
me ask you not to permit your feelings as Protes- 
tants to act as a prejudice against the claims of the 



188 CHRISTIAN HEROISM. 

Catholic Xavier to your love and admiration. The 
proverb that no good could come out of Nazareth, 
once met with a wonderful rebuke. Out of a land 
so unpromising came a Christ. Out of the Roman 
Church, notwithstanding the dark stains upon its 
character, there have in all the old centuries shone 
forth at times rays of beautiful light, as when the 
sun gleams out from among the clouds. From that 
Church came Fenelon, Massillon, Guyon, names that 
would not by comparison disgrace the holiest ones 
of the human race. And particularly in this 
department of missions did the old Catholic Church 
reveal a spirit wonderfully like the spirit of the 
Saviour. All over this land, from the Gulf to the 
Canadas, have the holy fathers trodden when other 
hearts quailed before the ^dangers and the depressing 
solitudes of this once desolate world. The Indians 
of the Canadas differ to-day from the blood-thirsty, 
brutal Sioux, because, led by the Catholic priests, 
the Northern tribes, before you and I were born, 
learned to look at the crucifix and bow in prayer. 
Out of the old Catholic Church came Xavier. Rich 
in gold, but richer still in spirit, high by titles of 
rank, but higher still by that manhood which Christ 
confers, nothing offered him happiness but the wide 
search for souls. He was the Christopher, the 



CHRIST I AX HEROISM. 189 

Christ bearer, of the sixteenth century. In that 
century no theologian found Christ : only the 
missionary knew the heart of Jesus. Entering a 
village in the Indies, he walked through the middle 
of the streets ringing a little bell, calling men, and 
women, and children around him ; his dress was 
simplicity itself,, his face benignant; his eloquence 
that of righteousness and love. When a ship's crew 
was attacked with disease he became " all things to 
all men;*' as physician he prescribed for the sick, 
as a nurse he washed the clothes of the men ; as a 
minister of religion he pointed the dying to the 
cross. He penetrated almost all the Eastern lands, 
and was drawing near the Chinese millions when 
death carried him from the field of battle, to the 
land of eternal peace. I can not forbear repeating 
here a second time before you the farewell hymn of 
Xavier when his friends would dissuade him from 
his noble conception: 

Hush you! close your dismal story; 

What to me are tempests wild? 
Heroes on the way to glory 

Heed not pastimes of a child, 
For the souls of men I'm sailing, 

Blow, ye winds, north, south, east, west, 
Though the storm be round me wailing, 
- There '11 be peace within my breast. 



190 CHRISTIAN HEROISM. 

The name of Judson may serve to illustrate the 
same spirit bursting forth from the Protestant world; 
but with this difference of scene, that at last the 
beauty and impressiveness of any one star is lost in 
the grandeur of a whole heaven bestudded in all its 
blue. Judson led in the mighty works of this 
century, a kind of morning star running before its 
great sunshine. For about forty years he toiled for 
his fellowmen, and repeated in the nineteenth cen- 
tury what Paul had done in the first, and Xavier in 
the sixteenth. It is all one story — love, labor, 
suffering, and heroic death. If you will study these 
three lives until your heart can see these three 
heroes going forth each day to their toil, you will 
have in your possession something that will keep 
ever before you the sublime attributes of man, and 
will make you feel that perhaps humanity was made 
in the image of God. 

When profane history spreads out before you the 
bloody page of Alexander, and Caesar, and Nero, 
and your heart feels faint and sick, turn away and 
look upon these missionary faces that have gone 
from earth to heaven, and your eyes will dim with 
tears of gratitude that God made man so noble in 
feelings and in destiny. Guizot and Hallam and all 
the philosophers of history tell us what good influ- 



CHRISTIAN HEROISM. 191 

ences came from the knights-errant that wandered 
for a few generations over Europe. We are assured 
that they rode to and fro with helmet and sword 
and armor in the interest of equity. It is possible 
that they developed military prowess and some new 
conception of personal honor. But whenever the 
world's civilization shall desire to see the heroes 
that laid the deep foundations of our age and of 
the coming more golden time, it will have to pass 
by the glittering mail of knights and see the Pauls, 
and Marquettes, and Elliotts, and Duffs moving 
around wearing the sword of the spirit and the 
richly jeweled helmet of salvation. 

And mark the excellence of these names above 
other names than these written in heraldry. 
Pronounce the beloved words that recall the 
philanthropists of the past, Wilberforce, Bright, 
Garrison, Sumner, all that long array of lofty ones, 
and yet the missionary spirit of Paul and Xavier 
outranks them all, for the reforms of Sumner and 
Wilberforce were but the border of the garment; 
not the whole realm of riches and hope and faith 
and piety, but only the civil liberty of mankind. 
Hence, when our slaves became free some of the 
great souls which for years had plead for that 
freedom sunk within their bosoms as though the 



192 CHRISTIAN HEROISM. 



work of life had been done. One of these confessed 
that it remained only for him to die and find rest. 
But the missionary spirit begins afresh when the 
statesman casts his work down. It includes the 
philanthropy of Charles Sumner as the light of the 
sun includes the light of the moon, and the twilight 
of morn and eve. Sumner, and Howard, and Night- 
ingale are satellites that revolve around that great 
blazing center of love in which the Paul and the 
Christ acted out their careers. Christianity included 
freedom and then rushed still on. 

In reflecting, this morning, over the missionary 
spirit can we escape observing the fact that whether 
it was Paul rising up in the first century, or Xavier 
in the remoter time, or Judson in our era, the scene 
is the same? Between those three souls there is no 
discord ; and for this reason : their spirits came 
from one fountain — Christ. The schools may furnish 
theologians and preachers ^nd send them forth out 
of all harmony and able to throw the world into 
discord, but it is Christ alone who creates the 
missionaiy. All these illustrious children of the 
wilderness, these preachers under the trees, and 
among the wild men of the East and West, drew 
nothing from man, but all from God ; and hence, 
come when and where they may, they are all one 



CHRISTIAN HEROISM. 193 

picture within. By the principle of geometry, that 
things equal to the same thing are equal to each 
other, these widely separated heroes are alike because 
they are like to the same original of Nazareth. 
Theology fights the more the farther it is from Christ. 
O, loftiest spirit of earth, the soul of a Paul, or 
a Xavier, or a Judson ! What want there may seem 
of beauty comes from our inability to rise high 
enough in our feelings to see and measure this 
grandeur. It is said that men throw their offerings 
down at the feet of the gods because the human 
eye is unable to see and the human arm too short 
to enable the worshiper to place his garlands upon 
the forehead of Deity. With similar weakness and 
humility we all, of a mercenary and infidel age, 
being unable to see and reach the divine forehead 
of this missionary spirit, that loftiest shape of soul, 
can not do otherwise than come to-day and whisper 
our words of homage at her feet. The ancients saw 
in their sacred vales and woods three graces, and at 
times, in poetic moments, nine muses; but this 
single grace, the spirit of love, this wandering virtue 
of missions, surpasses all the old fabled ones of 
history. Setting forth from Bethlehem, this love of 
man for man has journeyed over all continents, and 
to-day seems to be only beginning the development 

13 



194 CHRISTIAN HEROISM. 

of her divine plan. Continents that lie in darkness 
shall see light, and the wilderness that has no 
beauty shall soon bloom like the rose. Here in the 
noise and dust of traffic and under the shadows of 
sin, you and I fail to see these divine features, but 
should it ever be our happiness to pass within 
heaven's gate, oh, how these earthly hearts that 
turned many to righteousness will, in that upper 
sky, shine as stars for ever and ever. 



YOUTH : 
ITS DUTIES A2sD PKIYILEG-ES. 



SERMON XI. 
YOUTH, ITS DUTIES AND PRIVILEGES. 



Ecclesiastes, 12th chapter. 

TF, as is commonly supposed, this chapter was 
-^ written by Solomon, our boasting century must 
award him the honor of having penned a passage 
not to be surpassed for beauty and wisdom and 
pathos by any thing in modern literature. Upon the 
theme, " Youth, its Duties and Privileges," Solomon 
ought to have written well. If, as is often said, no 
eloquence can come from an empty heart, from 
Solomon's heart, full of final failure and bitterness, 
there should have come easily just such an eloquence 
of sadness and penitence as appears in this address 
to the young. The great king had wasted his 
gifted life. He had loosed the silver cords ; had 
broken the pitcher at the fountain. The windows 
out of which he had once seen a beautiful world 
had become darkened. We maj T confess that 
Solomon must have written the chapter, for only out 



198 YOUTH, ITS DUTIES AND PRIVILEGES. 

of his full heart could such eloquence have poured. 
What a sublime multitude was in his mind when 
he called up before his imagination all the young 
men of his empire! But the multitude was sublime 
beyond the vision of the writer, for hundreds of 
years after Solomon and his throne had perished, 
those words were to pass from Hebrew to Greek 
words, from Greek to Latin, from Latin to German 
and English, and be read and loved by millions in 
continents then unknown. Strange things happen 
in the world of mind. When the poor, blind Homer 
was singing his songs in old villages three thousand 
years ago, his poverty-stricken heart could not have 
dreamed that in all the subsequent ages the greatest 
men of all nations would read his verses with inex- 
pressible delight. Solomon may have written this 
chapter in his chamber, only for his own instruction 
and relief, just as a full heart will often weep in 
secret, but unawares Solomon addressed the whole 
world. The walls of his chamber were taken away 
and all the centuries saw the weeping thinker and 
the sad thought. 

Let us leave now the old unhappy king and 
spend our half-hour beside that great stream of life 
called "youth." No science has yet told us when 
youth terminates. This must come from the fact 



YOUTH, ITS DUTIES AND PRIVILEGES. 199 

that there is no definite boundary to that beautiful 
state. It begins indeed at the cradle, but just 
where its precious period ends and where middle 
life begins no one has been able to announce. 
Perhaps God has mercifully hidden the dividing line 
that we may not weep as we pass over it, but may 
go onward with a light heart, not knowing that the 
light of the spirit is becoming mingled with shadow. 
Let us then accept of the indefiniteness of nature 
and declare youth to be a period reaching from the 
cradle out into the area of life, but without exact 
confines. As clay fades into night, thus youth fades, 
and after a time the soul looks up and says, " Night 
has come." While these boundaries are indefinite, 
yet there are hundreds here to-day who know that 
they are living in this period declared as golden, not 
only by poets but by philosophers. They know it 
not only by the mere count of years, but by the 
buoyancy and hope of their hearts. As yet the 
world lies not back of them, but before them. Like 
children of a Christmas, they are happy not because 
the day has come, but because its light is about to 
dawn. The human heart is great only when it is 
capable of great inspiration. When those years are 
upon man in which the morrow is wreathed with 
splendor like the nimbus around the foreheads of 



200 YOUTH, ITS DUTIES AND PRIVILEGES. 

the old saints, then the mind and whole soul are 
passing through their period of greatest power. 
When the heart is so susceptible that all the winds 
of earth, even the softest whisper, waken music 
amid its strings, then the greatest days of this life 
are passing. They may not be the most powerful 
days in actual events. Events come slowly. But 
they are the most powerful days in all those 
qualities that produce events. The actual harvest is 
always far away from the sowing time. Indeed, the 
harvest comes toward the fall of the year. It 
stands close by the autumn leaf. But the days that 
made the harvest began far back in the March and 
April rains. So the noble events of life come, 
perhaps, in full or late manhood, but they are only 
the ripened fruit of a tree that put forth its leaves 
and blossoms long before, when the noble atmos- 
phere of youth lay around the spirit. The young, 
looking at all the illustrious ones of the world, and 
marking that they are standing in middle life, feel 
that they can hope little from the present, as it still 
is too far away from great action. Fatal mistake ! 
That middle life so full of honors is only the place 
where the stream of youth empties all its long-borne 
treasures. Middle life is the place where the torrent 
of the heart tumbles into the sea. Coleridge says, 



YOUTH, ITS DUTIES AND PRIVILEGES. 201 

u No one ever became a poet after he had passed 
his twenty-first year." The meaning of such words 
must be that such a beautiful fabric as verse can 
be woven only out of moments full of life's early 
enthusiasm and early colorings. Indeed, the most 
remarkable men of all history have achieved their 
greatness by the time the thirtieth year had come, 
for up to that period the idealism, the dreams, the 
vehemence of the mind, the inspiration of the soul, 
sweep along in all the majesty of a heavy wave or 
a rushing storm. As the Cumean sibyl raved when 
the spirit of prophecy was upon her; as the old 
prophets seemed half frenzied when their lips sang 
those stately strains of destiny, so the utterances and 
deeds of middle life are only the final language of 
that sibyl that raves in the bosom all through the 
inspired hours of life's morning. 

There are many melancholy scenes on earth. The 
millions of poor in Ireland might well touch all 
souls with pity. All over the world there are 
strewn great calamities of mankind. A journey 
among men is much like passing through a forest 
after a tornado has just passed bj', or like passing 
through Calabria on the morning after the earth- 
quake had shaken it ; but more painful than all these 
scenes is the spectacle of millions of youth daily 



202 YOUTH, ITS DUTIES AND PBIVILEGES. 

exhausting upon low pursuits, or childish pursuits, 
an enthusiasm and an inspiration of soul implanted 
by the Creator for the purpose of creating and deco- 
rating a world. Every young heart of man or 
woman carries within it a vitality that may make, 
and a genius that may beautify, a vast empire. As 
God implants in the young bird a power that makes 
it at last spread its wings and cast itself upon the 
soft air, so into the young bosom, which He loves 
more than He loves the sparrow, He has emptied 
an urn of enthusiasm, of hope, of sentiment, of love, 
of ambition, which are to become the wings of all 
subsequent flight. Trusting yourselves, my young 
friends, to these wings, the great air of the world 
will softly and sweetly bear you up. But to permit 
this holy vitality to exhaust itself in a saloon beneath 
the pavement, to compel the inspiration of a young 
heart to spend its divine resources upon a drunken 
song, or to study only the shape and colorings of a 
toilet, to turn away such a gifted spirit from the 
intoxication of learning, of art, of culture, of religion, 
and make it beat its bright wings only in the foul 
cages of vice, is the most painful of all the pictures 
seen in the drama of man — most painful because so 
vast and so influential for wretchedness. 

The classic books which nearly all of you have 



YOUTH, ITS DUTIES AND PRIVILEGES. 203 

read (thanks to that public education which has 
given the world's literature to all the rising genera- 
tion,) told you of a lake called " Avernus." "Aver- 
nus" means birdless. Located in the desolate crater 
of an extinct volcano, a poisonous air issuing from 
the infernal depths hung over the dark water, and 
stupefied the sense of the eagle or the nightingale 
that tried to pass from shore to shore. Suddenly the 
wing became powerless, and the eagle with his pride 
and the nightingale with his song fell into the river 
of death. Let us bless the classics that they have 
handed down to us such a figure of human life. 
There is a lake of pleasure, of folly, of sin, lying 
near the homes of the young. A deadly air hangs 
over it. The young, forgetful or ignorant of its fatal 
vapors, spread their wings upon its hither shore — 
those wings made in Heaven, and good enough for 
angels. But at last their flight is checked, and be 
the heart once proud like the eagle's, or sweet with 
song like the lark's, alike it falls into the dark flood. 
Thus all ye young be assured that the wonderful 
activity within, and the rosy imagination of these 
days, are a power that should be busy constructing 
the future. A happy middle life does not spring up 
out of itself. The eloquence of Henry Clay did not 
come to him in 1830 or 1840, when he stood in the 



204 YOUTH, ITS DUTIES AND PRIVILEGES. 

height of power, but came in that rosy light of 
oratory that hung over his cradle in 1777 and in 
that longing of the soul that made the corn-fields of 
Virginia the audience of his recitations and solilo- 
quies. Thus all greatness comes from permitting the 
inspiration of youth to pour itself along some sacred 
path. At twenty-five the trickling drops have be- 
come a stream ; at thirty the streamlet has become 
a majestic river. The heart will never become as 
powerful again as it was when it was young and 
possessed the power to enlarge the future, and, 
like the sun, draw up sweet water from that out- 
spread sea. The sadness of old age lies partly in its 
inability to paint any longer in brilliant colors. 
Unless old age finds itself full of the poetry and 
rapture stored up in life's morning, it becomes only 
a solemnity, a face turned downward. The blessed- 
ness of young life lies in its privilege of singing : 

There is a fount about to stream, 
There is a light about to beam, 
There is a warmth about to glow, 
There is a flower about to blow. 

Let us now ask the question, How shall the 
young make the most of life ? The most general 
answer and the most valuable one is, "By common 
sense and by will power." What keeps you from 



YOUTH, ITS DUTIES AX I) PRIVILEGES. 205 

throwing yourself into the lake, or into a fire, or 
from the roof of the house ? This simple quality of 
man called common sense is the nearest and best 
guardian angel of each mortal. Others believe in 
other guardian angels. But inasmuch as God has 
given you all this will-power and this common sense 
it is almost an impertinence in us to demand addi- 
tional guardian angels from the same heaven. 

Some declare that religion will save the young, 
and that alone. But this reply is too superficial — 
for what will set religion before the mind in the 
proper light ? What shall unfold its value ? At the 
foundation of all safety lies, therefore, " common 
sense," that forbids you to hurl yourself into the 
sea or down the precipice. Into this God-macle bal- 
ance place the good and ill of earth and weigh 
them, and then hold fast to that which is good. 

The young of the past have been deeply injured 
by a philosophy which informed them that they 
possessed no power, that they must seek some day a 
divine overshadowing that would in an instant 
change their natures and set them out upon the new 
career of saints. Under the influence of this blight 
our youth have assumed themselves to be powerless, 
and have drifted along in every folly and weakness, 
expecting the Deity to come and remake them at 



206 YOUTH, ITS DUTIES AND PRIVILEGES. 

some later day. The tens of millions of ruined youth 
in the world now show that God does not often 
come to a life that has neglected itself. God sent 
His angel of human will and human judgment before 
Him, and He loves to enter the heart, not that 
rejected His messengers, but that received them. 

Hence, the first law of reform or of protection 
is that we dare not think the thought or do the 
deed of a fool. Castelar says that Alexandre Dumas 
failed of greatness because u he was willing to tell 
a li6 in his books." Literature reposes upon truth. 
So a good life reposes upon common sense, and can 
not stand upon a basis of folly. Why should God 
send other angels if we despise the first? 

Second law of success : This intelligence must 
busy itself chiefly in keeping always before the 
mind " high ideals." Life must not be projected 
upon a scale of simple amusement, or of riches, or 
ease, but upon a plan of high spiritual nature. 
This thought has already been involved in what we 
have said about the beautiful outlook of youth. 
Setting forth in his career, each human being living 
in our land and century perceives a light on the 
far off horizon. Before us in early years this light 
is white and charming. To compel the will to look 
always toward it, and to persuade the heart always 



YOUTH, ITS DUTIES AND PRIVILEGES. 207 

to love it, is the highest duty of early life. This 
ideal will be found composed of two things — an 
integrity toward man and God, and then some idol 
of this life. Follow it, and you will find religion as 
to God, and a glorious life pursuit as to earth. 
Byron held to only one-half the vision. But he 
made a gigantic world out of that half. His ideal 
never moved from its place. The Scotch reviewers 
could not extinguish or eclipse the star. Wherever 
the unhappy lord went, his harp was in his hand, 
and all the world of beauty, all the seas, all the 
mountains, all the joys and griefs of mankind, came 
to him to be blessed with the immortality of song. 
Before Franklin stood the dream of wisdom and 
knowledge. Before all who have ever reached a 
valuable distinction there has stood a future full of 
a light that has never once gone out. With these 
two lofty heights before the eye, the height of 
morals and of personal development, life can not be 
a failure, end where it may, in middle years or in 
old age. 

But these thoughts bring us now to one of the 
most powerful enemies of the young. There is a 
foe on the field that is vanquishing many a gifted 
brain. Of the power of sin and folly I have already 
spoken. Let us confess, now, the hunger for riches 



208 YOUTH, ITS DUTIES AND PRIVILEGES. 

to be one of the most injurious appetites that gnaws 
at the modern heart-strings. It is all the more to 
be dreaded because it comes backed by the phil- 
osophy of the whole century. The philosophy 
of Plato and the Bible turned men toward 
spirituality, and forth came the thinkers, the poets, 
the philosophers, and the apostles. The philosophy 
of Bacon came and turned man toward things. 
Railways, and ships, and carriages, and houses, and 
farms, and stores, and all the million of things 
poured out of the new shape of reason like sparks 
from a conflagration. Whereas once the world was 
full of beauty or chivalry, it is now overflowing 
with things. Money represents all these things. It 
will buy any thing from a diamond to a railway. 
Hence, money stands for almost all the world 
material, and dust made and perishable. In other 
times it might have stood for religion, or knowledge, 
or culture. But our philosophy being material, 
money follows the genius of the times and stands 
for things and not for soul. Thus before the 
millions of the young shines a star unworthy to 
guide the spirit, a yellow star lurid as Mars, sickly 
as the Dog star in August. The Astor who has 
just died, the great millionaires about to go from 
earth, have written over their own pursuits, " All is 



YOUTH, ITS DUTIES AND PRIVILEGES. 209 

vanity." If only a few men in a generation were 
struggling for gold, the world could bear the strain, 
but when the public philosophy is material, and all 
the sweet infants are born into the passion for 
money as they are born into liberty and language, 
the outlook seems draped with clouds. 

Such being the weakness of the age, the youth 
in whose bosom there remains some of the spiritual 
power accustomed to shed over nature something 
of a divine light must battle against the sin of his 
day, and set up again some ideal holier than money. 
He must open the hearts of all the great dead that 
lie dreaming in the silent past, and find how feeble 
in all of them was the love of money, but how 
powerful the love of the true, the beautiful, and the 
good. He must lift the shroud from the forehead 
of all, from the Sappho of old Greece and the 
Terence and Virgil of Rome to the last great soul 
that has left earth and there see that for none of 
them did riches weave a single wreath. Humility 
of property and of soul inserted all the flowers in 
their chaplets. 

It is the custom now of those who have lived 
for money alone to be urged in their last da}^s to 
make large bequests to schools, colleges, libraries; 

and some of them, les-s perfectly ruined by the 
14 



210 YOUTH, ITS DUTIES AND PBIVILEGES. 



# 



passion than others, do surrender at last the riches 
that can not follow them. This dying act we call 
charity. And such it is. But such a final adminis- 
tration of the effects of the dead only shows that 
our little money, before we come to the grave, 
should take these spiritual paths confessed to be so 
noble. The wills of the rich are thus only 
penitential tears falling over a misspent life, telling 
us not how gold should be employed after one has 
gotten a million and stands by a grave, but how it 
should be administered when one's cheek is still in 
bloom and the star of the soul shines out in its first 
magnitude. 

The young man tells me that his ideal of life is 
high, but he has not the means of reaching it. Well, 
wealth is not often the means. The highest ideals 
are best reached from the humble home. 

Almost the whole column of great names stands 
upon the bed-rock of humble property. Our states- 
men, our thinkers, our writers, our judges on the 
bench, our orators, have all been born poor. In all 
the history of man the pursuit of gold has warred 
against the development of self. The rock of pov- 
erty seems hard and cold, but within it is jasper. 

The pursuit and the possession of money clip the 
wings of the soul. All through literature, all through 



YOUTH, ITS DUTIES AND PRIVILEGES. 211 

art, the plain cottage, the unpretending home, stands 
for the triumph of earth. The poets, the painters, 
the orators — all these sensitive souls — know where 
human happiness has been found in all the long ex- 
perience of man. They read the book of fate for 
us and tell us its true meaning. And yet these 
inspired brains, when they have wished to show us 
the beauty of life, have never led us up to the door 
of a palace, but always to some place where the 
rose blooms by a quiet spot, and where the song of 
the birds and the light of the sun meet in the same 
interlacing leaves, the waves of light and the waves 
of sound flowing together toward the heart. The 
magnificent kings have wished often for the peace 
of humble life. The court of Charles X., sickened 
by splendor, repaired to the country and dressed as 
shepherds and toiled for a time, that they might 
touch life, not in its cares, but in its sweetness. In 
the novel of Auerbach it was not Irma in the palace 
that was so blessed, but Irma in her mountain home 
that gave the writer such a picture of spiritual and 
physical beauty. The care of large property injures 
the soul by turning it away from those mental and 
moral paths along which grow the sweetest and most 
imperishable flowers. This is no new view. It is not 
the telling of a secret. The world knows that the 



212 YOUTH, ITS DUTIES AND PRIVILEGES. 

highest happiness is found in the constant pursuit 
of an ideal, and that the chase for riches is only an 
intoxication like the fascination of the goblet of wine 
or the cup of flattery. We all drink these cups, not 
because they are valuable, but because we are weak. 
What is called " moderate property " or even 
"humble means," is the best condition of success. 
An educated book-keeper has within his reach a 
triumph which the owner of the "bank" or the 
"business" may never reach. Emerson says, "Give 
me health and a June day, and I will make the 
pomp of kings ridiculous." It is necessary only to 
throw down the god Money from his pedestal, to 
trample that senseless idol under foot, and to set up 
all the higher ideals — a neat home, vines of one's 
own planting, a few books full of the inspiration of 
genius, a few friends worthy of being loved and able 
to love in return, a hundred pleasures that bring no 
penitence, a devotion to the right that will never 
swerve, a simple religion empty of all bigotry, full 
of faith and love, and to such a philosophy earth 
will give up what joy it knows. With these sublime 
images around one, the heart will rest in the center 
like the sun in the midst of his attendants, with all 
the bright planets around, radiant in light and sweet 
in harmony. 



TOUT II, ITS DUTIES AND PRIVILEGES. 213 

This, my young friends, is not my philosophy ; it 
is a theory of life drawn from all the world's ex- 
perience. Not a generation has lived upon earth 
which has not, after having tried all the paths of 
action, bowed at last to the philosophy that it, is the 
steady light of noble ideas that makes life pass in 
blessedness and in peace. Home, industry, education, 
friends, honor, and religion, are the ministering angels 
that alone are worthy to wait upon the human soul. 
In their arms they shall bear you up. 

To the young this philosophy comes with peculiar 
power. There are many persons in this house to 
whom all this glowing theory of life is in vain. 
They are far along in years. It is too late for them 
to think of placing before their eyes a star that shall 
guide them and never grow dim. They must com- 
pose their hands for death, crossing them upon the 
breast. But to you, young men and young women, 
this divine philosophy, wrung from the tears of for- 
mer times, comes like the song of the morning lark. 
It greets you as you rise from your couch. This 
morning hymn, sung by the world, is for you. To 
us older ones come only evening hymns, the misereres 
of memory and sorrow. Before you the world lies 
to-day greater in its power and beauty than ever 
before any young souls, since it rose from the sea of 



214 YOUTH. ITS DUTIES ANB PRIVILEGES. 

chaos. Remember, then, that you must grasp this 
life while the inspiration of youth is pouring like a 
torrent through your heart. You will not dare 
exhaust upon sinful or trifling pursuits a nerve-power 
that is. indeed, the first vibration of the strings that 
should make immortal music. Use not the harp of 
God at a dance of Bacchanals. Trample under foot 
the new idol called Riches, and remember that out 
of humble life the mightiest souls have come, and 
on the threshold of a cottage the holiest sunlight 
has always fallen. 



A GEEAT GOD. 



SERMON XII. 
A GREAT GOD 



"For the Lord is a great God." — Psalms 95:3. 

"TTTONDERFUL as the unfolding of the natural 
^ * world is the unfolding of the world spirit- 
ual. The natural world is the school house in 
which we may, if we will, learn the higher truths 
of the moral universe. But as children often sit 
in the school room all through their early years 
unwilling to learn the lessons, longing for play or 
idleness, so we older ones pass our time in the 
great academy of nature with our idle eyes 
wandering far away from the valuable page. Let 
us try to-day to study one lesson, if for only an 
hour; perhaps, as we all grow older, we may pass 
from page to page, and find all the book richer 
and more valuable the more we hang over its varied 
contents. 

The first idea in this morning's study is that as 
the floral world is developed out of itself, as the 



218 A GREAT GOD. 



animal world is evolved from the less to the greater, 
so ideas grow, and from humility pass on to great- 
ness, from cloud roll out into light. As the moon 
at night often remains partly concealed, and leaves 
the traveler or the poet or the lover uncertain as 
to where the loved satellite may be, but as 
presently the great silver ball moves out into the 
clear sky, so the ideas of man are only half visible 
at first, and pass out into the cloudless azure only 
after the eyes of earth have watched long and 
faithfully. There is a perfect harmony between 
the world of plants and animals and the world of 
ideas. Once there was a wild dog moving stealthily 
through the old forests back of the Aryans and the 
Greeks. It was the color of the ground, that more 
powerful enemies could not see it readily, and that 
in its own ambush it might be invisible. It did 
not bark. It did not recognize in man its coming 
friend, nor did man six thousand years ago see in 
that creature of the forest the brute that was to 
come nearest of all the wordless animals to being 
a companion. Thousands of years have passed, and 
now a hundred or more species exist of this once 
wild beast of night and of prey. Once the plain 
wild rose bloomed in the woodland. But the toil 
and the science and affection of man stood by this 



A GREAT GOD. 219 



" sweet briar" for hundreds of years, and now all 
the civilized world is filled with roses of every 
size and every color and every perfume. Thus the 
material kingdom widens under the influence of 
intelligence and industry, passing from the small to 
the great as the spark of fire kindles into a 
conflagration. 

Just such is the growth of ideas. Man reaches 
a physical maturity at the age of thirty or fort)', 
but there are ideas which will grow steadily for 
thousands of years without having reached any 
perfect stature, and without having found a resting 
place. There are other notions that are born 
complete. When the first human intellect declared 
that two and two are four, it exhausted the formula. 
The idea was finished. But when man for the 
first time pronounced the word "mother," or 
"liberty," or "friend," or "God," he began the 
construction of an object that should turn into a 
world, and from a world into a universe. The 
word "mother" did not mean much in the earliest 
tribes, for they would often put to death parents 
too old to work. In Abraham's day the word 
" sister ' : did not imply much beyond the meaning 
of woman or slave. And in Lot's day the home- 
names, now so full of sacredness, had little 



220 A GREAT GOD.. 



significance. Father and daughter were sounds 

that scarcely rose one shade above the terms male 

and female ; and the word man differed little from 

the word brute. But along came the mighty 

stages of development pouring around these ideas 

the light of new thought and the warmth of new 

love. As the foliage of each Summer, and the 

riches of the elements fall upon the earth each 

year and make its soil deeper and richer, so the 

successive generations cast their thoughts and 

affections and actions down upon the world of 

ideas, and these ideas grow more and more luxuriant 

under this long lasting care. Behold the Greeks 

adding to the import of the word "art"! Under 

their care how the word " beauty " expands ! And 

there Antigone came along, born out of poetry, and 

by her pure and infinite affection put to shame 

that estimate of sister seen in the history of 

Abraham and Lot. Look into the nineteenth 

century and mark how it has enlarged these terms. 

Ask Cowper the meaning of that word " mother" 

that runs along through so many languages. He 

gazes at the portrait and says, with tears, 
" O that those lips had language." 

The word "mother" comes down through thirty 
languages and through thirty centuries, but each 



A GREAT GOD. 221 



age pours more of love and reflection into the 
beautiful urn. Our word " grace' 2 once in Sanscrit 
represented the prancing horses that drew the 
chariot of the sun, but the deeper spirituality of 
subsequent eras has made the word mean the easy, 
yielding friendship of a God. The sun's chariot 
passed away to make room for Christ. 

Among the ideas of earth that are most restless 
and most progressive and most infinite, let us con- 
fess the idea of God. As the first geographers 
made our earth so contemptible that a man or a 
turtle was an adequate foundation for its mass, so 
the first theologians saw God as only a hero or a 
sleeping, dreaming Oriental king. Compared with 
the nations around, the God of the Hebrews marked 
a wonderful progress, and looking into the darkness 
around him David truly sang his song, " For our 
Lord is a great God;" but even his picture was far 
below the reality, and the world hastened to move 
on. Christianity came and gave the idea of the 
Heavenly Father a new and wonderful impulse. 
The actions once attributed to Deity were repudiated 
by Christ, and out of that Xew Testament era there 
came a new Creator, a new Father. An idea 
marched rapidly forward. 

You perceive now, my friends, the method of my 



222 A GREAT GOD. 



argument, and it need not be pursued further. It 
is time to apply it to the religious faith and practice 
of our day. The lesson that comes to us from the 
argument is simply this: We must take the words 
of the past, "Our Lord is a great God," and empty 
into them the light and sentiment of the present, or 
else there will be no psalm for our hearts. One 
thing that chills modern worship may be found in 
the attempt of modern hearts to worship the God 
pictured in the far-off yesterday. If you would love 
your child you will not dare ask old India to define 
the word child for you. If you are to fight for 
liberty you will not dare ask an old Persian king to 
define, the political idea in your behalf. No heroism, 
no sacrifice, will spring up in your bosom out of his 
thought. But if your own daj^ tells you that liberty 
implies the freedom of all, even women, and implies 
the freedom of the mind from ignorance, and of the 
soul from degrading vice, then you can go to the 
battle-field with divine calmness and power. It can 
not be otherwise in the act of worship. It will be 
perfectly vain for you to attempt laying flowers of 
affection upon the altar of the Hebrew God, or 
Calvin's God, or the Papal God. 

One of the first preludes of worship must be the 
gloria, " Our God is a great God," for unless the 



A GREAT GOD. 223 



soul feels that it is approaching a being of infinite 
beauty, a being without spot, the worship will all 
turn into mockery, notwithstanding the upturned 
face and bended knee. As a fact, no age will ever 
be able to find' an exact image of the Creator. • But 
the world is cumulative, and will, as a general rule, 
give in its later estimate more truth in religion than 
it found in all former meditations. Hence, you who 
feel ever the impulse of worship, the sweetness of 
it, the solemnity of it in the spirit, must be careful 
to kneel at the altar of a great God, that you may 
yourself be transfigured on the holy mount. It 
often comes to pass that the best worship comes 
into the soul when it is out under the heavens at 
night, or in the forests in Summer, because there the 
infinity of the sky, that host of stars whose light 
has come to us only by falling a million years, or 
the sweet solitude of the forest wliere every leaf 
seems written upon hj the finger of the Omni- 
present One, fills the human spirit with such a 
consciousness of a great God that the worshiper 
bursts forth in tears. Coleridge, in the valley of 
Chamouni, betrays the secret of all deep worship : 



Awake, 
Voice of sweet song! Awake, my heart, awake! 
Green vales and icy cliffs, all join my hymn, 



22-± A GREAT GOD. 



Tliou first and chief sole sovereign of the vale, 
Oh, struggling with the darkness all the night 
And visited all night by troops of stars. 

Thus that immense phenomenon of nature be- 
came a voice eloquent; proclaiming the greatness of 
that Being before whom the human soul is wont 
to kneel. Whatever thus exalts the Creator exalts 
Him not only as a power, but as a love, and hence, 
in the sublimity of that mountain there came not to 
the religious mind only the feeling of nearness to 
One who made the world, but in the magnificent 
light, and in the whispering of the pines there came 
full persuasion of Heaven's tenderness toward man. 
We can not love a contemptible human being. All 
the beloved ones of history stand forth in some 
alluring atmosphere of genius, or truth, or beauty, 
and without much admixture of meanness or sin. 
Never can we carry our worship to a defective God. 
He must rise up before us in such a holy and 
alluring form that the heart will ask all the world 
to join it in its anthem. Actions, ideas, persons, 
creeds that once were the symbols of religion, and 
marred the divine idea by the blighting power of 
association, must be carefully removed from the 
temple that the worshiper may bow before something 
that he may deeply love. 



A GREAT GOD. 225 



Men come to the minister of religion and ask 
him how he explains this and that dark page of 
history, this or that dogma. Oftentimes the best 
reply would be, " Turn aside from all that record 
and go ask this age, these scenes, the wants of 
to-day, the longings of your soul to give you back 
the lost or injured God." Much that is called 
theology is only the place where men have trampled 
down the ground in their own mad conflicts. In 
India devout heathen move in procession through 
the streets saying "ram," "ram," and the spectators 
bow because those who thus run are priests of 
religion; but the Infinite God is not there. Those 
fakirs that cut their bodies with knives are all 
theologians. Thus the religious history of the world 
marks not the place where God has been, but only 
the places where human hope and human madness, 
human darkness and light, met and struggled and 
bled. When the poor heretic was burned at Geneva, 
when the covenanter girl was tied to a stake where 
the tide would slowly rise over her, when the 
witches were burned, when infants were damned — 
God was not present ; religion was not there. 
Those places were spots where contending men met 
just as old Carthage and old Alexandria were places 
where opposing vandals came together, and where, 
15 



226 A GREAT GOD. 



between sword and spear, warm life became death, 
and brilliant cities a desolation. 

When looking back you behold these harrowing 
scenes reaching along over the centuries, remember 
God was not there. For our God is a great Gocl. 
The sufferings of the martyr, the tears of the exile, 
the children lost because unbaptized, the men con- 
demned from all eternity, the auto-da-fes of earth, 
are not ideas to which ever God drew near ; but rather 
paths where the feet of man trampled when he was 
just emerging from the night of perfect barbarism, 
when women loved the amphitheater of death, and 
when heroes drank from the skull of an enemy. 
Before the modern soul can become a true worshiper 
it is often necessary to approach God, not upon the 
side of old history, but upon the side of new nature. 
Give us Jesus Christ and the great spectacle of the 
universe, that Being and these heavens, and we can 
find a God, to worship whom will ever be a joy. 
The moral splendor of Christ and the parallel infin- 
iteness of creation give the mind a Deity so great 
that all the universe becomes his temple, and all 
winds, and thunders, and bird-songs, combine in a 
hymn of adoration. 

Religion has been wrought out in its details from 
two different points of observation. A strange geo- 



A GREAT GOD. 227 



grapher, from some star, landing upon earth in the 
northern regions, would go back saying he had found 
a world of ice ; landing at the equator, he would 
declare he had found a planet covered with flowers. 
Thus religion has been described from two stand- 
points, but chiefly from the stand-point of man. The 
survey of it from the modern idea of God has yet 
scarcely been made. The world's heart has not 
toiled under the sublime watchword of the psalm, 
" Our Lord is a great God," and from that lofty 
statement made up all the essential parts of its wor- 
ship ; but rather the human family has said, " Man 
is a great man," and has drawn its creeds and cere- 
monies out of the human bosom. When you perceive 
candles burning by the altar and a pageant of bow- 
ing priests, whose robes are bespangled with gold, 
you may chant the words, " Great is man," but you 
must reserve for some other hour the higher chant, 
" Our God is a great God." You must keep back 
these higher words until either the vastness of the 
universe, or the great wave of human life, or the 
awful mystery of death, has led you away from the 
wax tapers, and brought you into the presence of 
the Infinite. The great sanctuaries of man, from the 
mighty St. Peter's of Rome to the great Abbey of 
Westminster, were for hundreds of years places where 



228 A GREAT GOD. 



the little children of religion played their sacred 
games around the altar of a God for whom they had 
no measurement. Could the real Deity have come 
down from the invisible home and poured Himself 
into those vain hearts, all the toys and ceremonies 
of the hour would have been overwhelmed by the 
glory of the Heavenly Father. When John Rogers 
or Servetus was suffering in the flames, could the 
great God of Heaven have revealed Himself, could 
that wretched throng around the kindling fire have 
had their souls enlarged until the true idea of God 
could have found entrance, that company would have 
plucked the victim from the stake and have begged 
to be forgiven for an error so weak and for a crime 
so cruel. They would have wept for days over such 
an injustice to a brother, and for engaging in such a 
satire upon the Almighty. 

Much of the indefiniteness of the Bible comes 
from the fact that God cares nothing for the mi- 
nutiae of human worship. There is nothing definite 
in the Bible except the picture of Christ leading 
man to virtue, because the greatness of God forbids 
that He should care for aught beside. To suppose 
the Creator of the universe to have a choice between 
immersion and sprinkling, to suppose the Almighty to 
be partial to a posture in prayer, to suppose Him to 



A GREAT GOD. 229 



have a choice between a government of bishops and 
a government by all the clergy, to inquire whether 
the Infinite One loves better the robes of the priest 
or the plain dress of the citizen — this is to degrade 
the name of God and to drag worship down to the 
level of a court etiquette. The Bible is the most 
indefinite of books in the delineation of forms, and 
the most definite of all books in pointing out the 
reward and punishment of virtue and vice. Its 
baptism is obscure ; its righteousness is most 
evident. Only a most precise and trifling argument 
can find Presbyterianism or the Episcopacy in the 
Bible ; but a broad, visible, noble argument points 
out the Saviour of mankind. It is only a micro- 
scopic analysis that can find in that book the world's 
" Confessions of Faith," but the human soul can 
not read a page in the book without hearing a 
whole sky-full of angels saying, " Blessed are the 
pure in heart." The manner of baptism, the time, 
the manner of the Trinity, the last analysis of 
Christ, the presbyter or the bishop, all these and a 
thousand more ideas lie in the Bible in utter neglect 
because the God whom we worship has no prefer- 
ence here. He cares not what man finds in the 
holy writings if only he finds virtue. I should as 
soon ask of God whether I should plant my flower 



230 A GREAT GOD. 



bed with pinks or with violets as to inquire of Him 
whether my baptism must be in much water or by 
a few drops. 

Taking your stand close by the greatness of 
God, not only does the smallness of much of man's 
creed appear in a strong light, but also much of its 
falseness falls with a thrilling pain upon the heart. 
Who is this God that any age or any individual 
should ever have debated the destiny of a dying 
infant? What is there in the Infinite One, what is 
there in that Being whose throne is in the center 
of the universe, in that Being whose sunlight is 
only a feeble emblem of His love, that should make 
the mother hasten to have her dying child baptized, 
lest it might fall from her bosom into a world of 
torments? What has God done that his name 
should suffer such long and painful degradation? 
God has done nothing to merit such a creed. But 
religion has been wrought out, not from the being 
of God, but from the being of man. Man has come 
to us in all ages, and offered us a Deity fashioned 
after the nearest king or despot, and millions of 
children, old and young, have gone to bed at night 
whispering their prayers to a Deity not so kind or 
sweet or just as the mother who has just bidden 
them " good night ! " In those days it used to be a 



A GREAT GOD. 231 



dreadful fear that perhaps we might that night go 
from the kingdom of our mother to the kingdom of 
God. Our mother was always more beautiful than 
God! 

It is now complained by public men, men full of 
fear for our country overrun by all forms of vice, 
that religion is doing little to purify the atmosphere 
that hangs like a cloud of doom over our nation, 
How far the Church at large merits such words of 
half sorrow and half reproach, no one can tell; but 
we feel fully ready to say that the more the altars 
of human worship draw their light and inspiration 
from the character of God alone, and linger less 
around the ideas that come only from man, the more 
rapid will be the ascent of the nation toward a 
higher life. Many an altar now exists to which the 
worshipers repair, not that they may find holiness, 
but may keep alive some ideas held by their fathers. 
A large part of church life is only a rivalry about 
systems instead of a humble worship of God. Oh, 
had we all the wings of piety that could carry us, 
and the breadth of mind for such a flight, and 
should we fly to the throne, and instead of deducing 
religion up from man bring it down from the realm 
of light, w^e should return • to earth with a piety 
that would dispel the fears of the statesmen and 



232 A GREAT GOD. 



make radiant the future of the great nation and 
the poor mortal heart. How can an altar reform 
earth when it is itself a part of earth? How can it 
lift us to God when its God is already upon the 
ground and is himself partly clay? Altars enough 
there are along the paths. And when the patriot 
counts them he may well wonder that good citizens 
do not come marching forth in holy multitudes out 
of such a cloud of incense. But it is not numbers 
of altars that most save men. All depends upon 
the idea to which the holy stones are heaped up. 
It will be ages upon ages before an altar to Presby- 
terianism, or Methodism, or to Romanism, or to 
Independency, or to Eloquence, or to Genius will 
bless the world like an altar to the Living God. 
The rtmning to and fro of men full of anxiety lest 
their Church may not be visible enough, the 
acrimonious warfare of sects over their childish 
properties, will never enter the world's great life 
and form a part of its goodness and piety. In 
presence of such a Church our nation can march 
right along to destruction, just as Rome sunk in 
vice while the temples were full and a thousand 
priests were intoning psalms at the altar. The altar 
was inscribed to man, not to God. The sanctuary 
of the Great God, with Christ as the High Priest, 



.4 GREAT GOD. 233 



is the only one from which the present century can 
come forth with a soul whiter than it carried into 
it. Our age must part company with the baleful 
associations of the old theology. A theology that 
unconsciously degraded the God it loved; it must 
define religion to be, not a belief, but a piety ; it 
must look up to God and from the Father, Son, ana 
Spirit draw down a religion with the greatness of 
God written all over it. It must hear that voice 
that created all things by the word of its power 
repeating the deep laws of his temple — a righteous- 
ness that loves the true and good ; a faith that 
guides ; a penitence that washes white ; a love that 
embraces the world ; a hope that adds eternity to 
time, paradise to earth, and a Christ the leader and 
inspiration in the midst of these doctrines, and then 
upborne by ideas so vast and so true the age may 
soon cease to weep that its temples do not bring it 
a higher civilization. We dare not make God a 
party to our petty warfare of creeds. We dare not 
employ Him in o,ur inquisitions or in our debates 
over transubstantiation or legitimacy. He must be 
seen only as the Great God sitting upon the throne 
of justice, so lofty, so infinite, that a soul passing 
into His temple will feel that nothing but a pure 
heart can .fit it for so sublime a worship. 



THE EMPIEE OF LAW. 



SERMON XIII. 
THE EMPIRE OF LAW. 



" Oh, how love I Thy law! It is my meditation all the day." 
—Psalms 119:97. 

T I ^HERE is not much that is accidental in the life 
-**- of an individual or a nation. One of the 
facts that the modern times are establishing is that 
the whole universe is under the reign of law. From 
the most immense and most remote sun to the 
smallest atom of dust, law is forming and retaining 
and guiding all things at all moments. Nothing is 
independent. Things and events once referred 
directly to God are now referred to the laws of 
God as to the invariable agent of the Almighty. 
This great inference affects not in the least the 
idea or providence of God. for here as among human 
actors the principle applies that what one does 
through an agent he does through himself. 

Some declare that the world seems less sacred 
and charming to them since science has brought in 



238 THE EMPIRE OF LAW. 

such an array of second causes between them and 
the marvels of nature, filling up with physical or 
mental forces a place once full of the Heavenly 
Father. But this disappointment is destined to be 
only temporary, for as soon as the mind can become 
fully acquainted with the conception of a universe 
of law, it will find the old world of accident or 
miracle a poor, small thing compared with a universe 
all moving under law. When God was supposed to 
be in the thunder or in the quick lightning, or in 
the pestilence, or in the conflagration of cities, or in 
the earthquake, he was taken from all other events 
and places so as to be employed in one flash of 
lightning or in one material crash. The philosophy 
of law exalts God into the infinite and occupies 
Him at once with all the worlds and all their 
contents. He no longer comes and goes, one day 
alarming by a calamity and then leaving society to 
feel that He has gone away and may not return for 
years, but He is always in us, and with us, and 
around us, not intermittent, but everlasting. This 
fact is not an argument for atheism, but rather for 
pantheism, for in such a world God is omnipresent 
indeed. 

We dwellers in such a methodical planet may 
therefore rest assured that the outcome of our lives 



THE EMPIRE OF LAW. 239 

will depend upon what rules we break and what 
rules we regard. If we are law-abiding children, 
then shall we find success ; if we are law-breaking, 
then shall we suffer defeat A human soul is sent 
into being just as is sent a tree, or flower, or a 
planet, or an empire. Its laws are around it, the 
ministering angels to bear it up. 

History is full of the ruins of empires and cities. 
Could you sit down by each ruin and find the 
causes that brought it, only one report would come 
from Palmyra, or Thebes, or Babylon, or Athens, or 
Alexandria : " We violated the laws of life and are 
dead." Within their once-living hands and hearts 
the laws of industry, of morals, of social life, of 
political well-being, were broken and death came. 
If from any cause the law of gravitation should be 
broken for an hour by our earth, it would fall away 
never to run her beautiful circle ao:ain. The sun's 
fiery ocean would, in a brief period, receive the 
falling, unfortunate star. But the law of gravitation 
is only one upon the great statute book. The old 
nations have all fallen because they regarded not 
the mighty decalogue written upon their rocks, their 
fields, their palaces, their homes, their hearts. The 
story of Moses is perpetual and universal. Encamp 
where men may, at Sinai or in America, there is 



240 THE EMPIRE OF LAW. 

always a Moses coming with shining face carrying 
in his arms the laws of God. The soul that sinneth 
it shall die. But it shall be well with the righteous. 
From this thought, that man is set down in the 
midst of laws, let us pass to a second reflection, 
that " law-abiding " is a term that blinds many a 
soul to the real significance of life. The word 
"law" has become so associated with only the 
prohibitions of God and nature that many a soul 
thinks itself a saint when it simply has not broken 
the few prohibitory statutes of its Maker. " Law- 
abiding" is a term that points out only the harmless 
soul. It shows us one who has never been wicked, 
not one who has been or shall be great. The Ten 
Commandments keep the soul from the gallows or 
from contempt, but they make no great character. 
As well might the philosopher Franklin, or the poet 
Bryant claim that their success had come from being 
obedient to the laws of New York as for a soul to 
point to the Ten Commandments as the basis of the 
halo of a saint. When the young man told Christ 
he " had kept all these from his youth up," Christ 
informed him that he lacked one thing yet — he 
lacked not the simple abstaining from sin, but an 
ardent espousal of some virtue. The decalogue 
saves weak souls from sin and vice, but it makes no 



THE EMPIRE OF LAW. 241 

heroes. The martyrs, the inventors, the missionaries 
from Paul to Xavier, the mighty men that have 
shaken the world and then made it come to their 
tombs to weep, have all woven their imperishable 
wreaths from the laws of industry and love, and 
faith and hope which they loved and fulfilled, and 
not from the criminal laws which they did not 
violate. If not to kill, not to steal, not to worship 
an idol, made great men, the road thitherward would 
be easy. Not here amid these criminal statutes can 
you and I find, therefore, the path to the best 
existence. We must obey them easily and always, 
and then seek new worlds to conquer. 

Perhaps the religious world wronged all us 
children when we were young by leaving us to feel 
that God had passed for us only laws against vice. 
We know not where to lay the blame. But this 
we know, that God hovered around all these laws 
of sin, and when we stood away from them we 
seemed to stand away from any commandments 
which came from the Creator. All other truths of 
the world seemed only the ideas of philosophy or 
science. The holy voice of Heaven did not seem 
to sound through them. We thought that the laws 
of economy came from Poor Richard's almanac ; 
that the freedom of slaves was a thought coming 

16 



242 THE EMPIRE OF LAW. 

from Wilberforce ; that the study and love of 
nature had been recommended by the poets. But 
now science has joined hands with religion, and has 
helped us find a God whose laws are underlying all 
things and pervading all things, as light shines all 
through the morning dew-drops. It is not probable 
that science intended so to magnify the office of the 
Creator, and often it has not consciously done so, 
but many are the religious hearts to-day which bless 
science for making the universe so large and for 
filling it every where with the presence of the 
Heavenly Father. The scientific minds have so 
pursued the theme of " law," " law," and with such 
wonderful success, that now we feel that there is 
no chamber of the soul, no hour of existence, into 
which the divine wish does not come. As the blood 
circulates in all the atoms of the body, making 
roses on the face of youth and painting the little 
fingers of the infant, and then filling the hero's 
heart, so the laws of the Infinite follow us, not in 
pitiless wrath, but in the tenderest love. They 
follow us when we eat, making the table a joy; 
they follow us in happy hours, opening the heart to 
friendship ; they are present in all the tears of this 
pilgrimage ; when we go to sleep we commit our- 
selves to the commandments of the universe, and 



THE EMPIRE OF LAW. 243 

they wake us when the measured hours have passed. 
All around us is law, like a sea rolling around an 
island. The admiration of the psalmist, who cried 
out, " How I love Thy law ! '' should undergo great 
enlargement in a centuiy that has found how vast 
and sublime is the empire of this beneficent 
legislation. 

If, now, these reflections are founded upon fact, 
then we must mark what are some of these great 
laws that so environ us, obedience to which will 
render us such good citizens. Take a single example 
— the law of the human will. The will is located 
in the soul, to be the impulse and governor of 
action. The law of the carrier-pigeon is an instinct. 
The law of migrating birds is also an instinct, like 
the infant's hunger for food. Instinct will do but 
one thing, and in but one way. The carrier-dove 
will fly only to one city. Infinitely above such a 
sense is the human will, for it sees before it a 
thousand paths and a thousand actions. It stands 
among events like a child in the flowery fields, 
at liberty to cull any of the beautiful, sweetly- 
perfumed blossoms on either hand. As God moves 
about in the middle of His universe, so man stands 
in the center of his realm, the disposer of events, 
the weaver of destiny. His is not the single motion 



244 THE EMPIRE OF LAW. 

of the messenger-bird in only one straight line to 
only one village, but it is His to manage a myriad 
of details, and arrange them into all forms of utility 
and beauty. Hence, the largest faculty of man is 
his will, that power that hurls the heart and mind 
along an orbit as magnificent as the path of a 
planet. This is the one of the Ten Command- 
ments that no one can disregard and live. When 
a young man draws near the confines of life and 
can not look at its noble possibilities and say, " I 
will," when he stands without resolve in such a 
crisis, all the mountain trembles with the thunders 
of wrath ; and hot lightnings carve the rocks because 
at the mountain's base there is taking place such 
a breaking of law. He is a harmless citizen who 
does not kill, and does not steal, and does not break 
a Sabbath clay. But to be harmless, is to be only 
an infant. He is the lofty mortal who can give 
his soul to a great mode of action and can say, "I 
will," in life's morning and forever keep the vow. 
Some European philosopher said, a few years ago, 
that "the universe is an enormous will rushing 
into life." Beautiful statement of the fact! God 
was full of power and beauty. His infinite soul 
filled all space. But He desired to see embodied 
in outer form the divine conception, and as the 



TUE^ EMPIRE OF LAW. 245 



fabled goddess saw her figure in the lake, so the 
true Deity made a universe that held the image of 
Himself. Having done this He created intelligent 
beings who could come and see the picture. Thus 
all that we behold, from the deep heavens to the 
colored violet, is the will of God rushing into life, 
as the dream of Angelo arose in the arches of 
St. Peter's, or the thought of Raphael burst forth 
in the Madonna. That very spiritual, intelligent 
potency which gave us the creation was bestowed 
upon man, and though not infinite in power, yet it 
does wonderful things in this seventy-year circle of 
life. It wakes up the sleeping spirit. The tendency 
of man is to repose. In southern climates the will 
grows weak and all the days pass as though sleep 
were the best form of immortality. But northward 
the will rises and awakes all the dreaming 
chambers of the soul. It shouts its orders, and all 
the sleeping troops in the soul rise as though the 
long drum-beat were sounded. Few are the men 
who are standing in the front by accident. The 
faces of the impressive ones were all marked faces. 
The forehead and the cheek were carved where the 
will struggled for mastery over the passions of the 
flesh. People are amazed when they see the 
pictures of the old worthies ; amazed at the rude 



246 THE EMPIRE OF" LAW. 

features, the furrowed forehead, the knotted chin 
and eyebrows. But the pictures we possess are 
gentler than reality, for art has a tenderness that 
makes it tone down and soften the rugged subject. 
Art forgets that the beauty of graceful lines is not 
half so impressive as the beauty of that marked, that 
homely face, where the God-like energy of the soul 
fought the great battle of politics, liberty, or science, 
or religion. When we remember what mighty works 
they have done and at what a cost of purpose, we 
desire no longer to have the old heroes come to us 
in the likeness of girlhood, but in the deep lines of 
power and solemnity. 

Write down, my young friends, as a law of God 
worthy of your love, this potency of the human will. 
Guided by the right, the right of public and private 
life, and the right in religion, it will take these years 
and shape them as the potter shapes clay into an 
Etruscan vase. But, this law neglected, all these 
years sink into a sleep that knows no waking. 

While seeking for some of these laws not 
gathered up in the first decalogue, may we not 
include faith and hope? When Christ told the 
multitude that if one had faith as a mustard seed 
he could move a mountain, He announced a law of 
the spirit. A positive belief in the progress of man 



THE EMPIRE OF LAW. 247 

and the presence of God will be to the heart like a 
breeze to the sailing ship. Faith and hope are a 
great motive power of the world. Along with a 
powerful will they cast the heart forward. But 
without faith and hope the will has no path for its 
mighty action. A large ship must have a sea to 
sail in. How shameful to launch an ocean-palace in 
only a stagnant pond! So the will-power seen in 
man begs for the ocean of faith and hope. Such 
machinery, such masts, such canvas, demand that the 
sea be deep and the voyage long. Life has always 
been compared to the sea. Accepting the figure, let 
us declare that faith and hope are the winds that 
blow over it, not only carrying our vessels to all the 
ports of the mighty nations, but ruffling the waters, 
makino* them sweet and beautiful. Faith comes into 
Christianity from the general outside experience of 
mankind. It did not originate in Christianity any 
more than eloquence originated in politics, or color 
on the painter's canvas. Eloquence journeyed into 
the political life because great themes lay there to 
be developed, and colors lingered with Titian and 
Paul Veronese because they held in their brains the 
subject and in their souls the taste that could weave 
into matchless beauty the gaudy pencils of light. 
Thus, faith entered Christianity because the scene 



248 THE EMPIRE OF LAW. 

before the Christ was sublime. The lofty purity of 
the soul, the infinite love of man for man and for 
God, the vista of endless life, were allurements 
which faith could not resist, and into Christianity 
she moved like a happy queen ascending for the 
first time the steps of her throne. The moment 
any thing — country, or pursuit, or love, or virtue, or 
heaven — -can lift up large ideas before the soul for 
faith and hope to seize upon, then is one's destiny 
secure, for the mind becomes full of inspiration and 
the spirit of music. This is that faith which Christ 
beheld up-rooting trees and moving mountains from 
place to place. 

There is one ill of life not often found in the 
catalogue of human calamity. It is not poverty. It 
is not humble parentage. It is not failure to find 
office or troops of friends. It is that languor which 
comes from the absence of an energetic will rushing 
forward through the gates of faith and hope. There 
is a kind of palm-tree in the very top of which, 
amid the leaves opening like a rosebud, there is an 
inner bud still. It is sweet to the taste. But 
travelers say that when one has plucked out this 
central bud, the tree at once withers and dies. It 
seems to be the tree's heart. Man seems to repeat 
in the spirit-world this phenomenon of the world of 



THE EMPIRE OF LAW. 249 



matter; for whatever plucks the faith out of the 
opening leaves of life makes the stately soul all 
wither. Happy day for earth when such a being as 
Jesus Christ came to stand in the center of religious 
belief to transform faith into a passion. Out of that 
new and infinite outlook came the new purity of 
the human heart; came the tenderness that abol- 
ished the Coliseum ; came the heroism that made 
martyrs ; came the spiritual pow T er that gave us 
new literature and new arts ; came the new high 
and solemn music ; came the equality of man that 
gave us liberty; came the pure worship that leads 
to Heaven. Where Christ has gone and has been 
deeply loved, languor, that withering of the soul, 
has been delayed or averted. The missionary has 
sailed out upon every sea ; the Elliotts and Mar- 
quettes have traversed the pine forests and the 
prairies ; the Henry Martyns have prayed in Persia ; 
every where the heart of man has moved out toward 
his fellow, because this faith and hope have beaten 
like a glorious midsummer storm upon the barren 
heart, and have transformed it into an Eden. Faith 
alone touches the strings of the soul and makes 
music. 

Such are some of the great laws that surround 
us in this world. Add them to the decalogue of 



250 THE EMPIBE OF LAW. 

Moses and feel that if you ,break one of these com- 
mandments, of the will, or of faith, or of hope, in 
that hour the clouds of sorrow are gathering upon 
your sky. There are criminal laws which having 
been respected, you will escape the doom of a felon, 
but you will not by them be made useful, or noble, 
or happy. There are physical laws which, if 
observed, will save you from weakness and sickness 
and premature death, but they will give you only 
the success of an organism, of a machine. Then 
come the spiritual laws, above all as God is above 
dust, and into these man casting himself, he becomes 
a living soul, with the days too short for his high 
duties and the years too few for his happiness. It 
is here, in the midst of these laws, God dwells. 
Certainly God is every where. When the prohi- 
bitions of the moral law are read to us, God is 
indeed there. 

But God is not like a human throne set only for 
the punishment of offenders. " Thou shalt not " is 
not the favorite language of the Blessed One, but 
rather, " Thou mayst." His laws of denial are few, 
of permission, infinite. Pass ye all from the God 
on Mount Sinai to the God on Mount Sion. Not by 
the lightnings, but by the sunshine of the latter, read 
the new tables of divine enactment. Read not only 



THE EMPIRE OF LAW. 251 

the whole story of Christ, that old, old story, till 
you hold it all in your heart, but read on until you 
behold the Infinite One in the human will laden 
with energy, in the faith that fills the future with 
ideals, in the philanthropy that enables one heart to 
love a world, in even the soul's perceptive power 
that drinks in the world's music and perfumed 
zephyrs. " Oh, how I love thy law!" Yes! love it 
in its written and unwritten forms ! Love it when 
found by the theologians, and, w T hen unseen by 
them, it was found by philosophy and by science ! 

The evil of a destructive skepticism must lie 
chiefly in that arrest of spiritual power which it 
must bring. There is a rationalism which, while it 
is busy destroying some ideas, is pouring tenfold 
love upon other thoughts. It moves away from a 
desert that it may build up a home in a paradise. 
This is a glorious rationalism. But there is an ultra 
logic which, instead of moving away from the 
desert, declares all other places to be also a sandy 
waste, and it sits down to perpetual stoicism or 
perpetual sorrow. Such a skepticism is a withdrawal 
of the supplies of life. For many of the springs of 
life can not be discovered and established by logic. 
The Nile may be followed and its sources found, but 
there are streams in the soul to whose fountain- 



252 THE EMPIRE OF LAW. 

heads our science can not come. It must be 
assumed that they come from the alpha of life, a 
personal God. The critical inquiry that denies this, 
has repealed in this overthrow of faith a law that 
has been the intense life of man. 

It already is becoming evident that the skepticism 
of our century is sending to the closet, or else to a 
life of indifference, many gifted brains which in a 
warmer age would have battled for man on the field 
of right or of religion. By as much as we grow in 
the number of our philosophers we seem to decline 
in the number of our heroes. Crusades that should 
rescue the tomb of Christ were possible in the 
eleventh century, because then enthusiasm swept 
through the human heart like a gulf stream. The 
nations were ruled by passion and romance. But 
crusades of heroes to redeem either the Church or 
the government, the tomb of Christ or the tomb of 
Washington, would seem impossible in the nineteenth 
century. It may be that a wide skepticism is 
already withdrawing great spiritual forces which 
once impelled and allured the armies of politics and 
religion. 

If, however, unbelief has not become a national 
evil, if it is beyond our power to enter the soul of 
a nation and discover what is checking the current 



THE EMPIRE OF LAW. 253 

of its once powerful life, we can at least go to the 
individual and tell him that unless lie loves and 
obeys these spiritual laws that lie all around him 
like a spider's web, his heart will become empty, 
and day will change to night. Read upon tables of 
rock the laws of industry, of will, of faith, of love, 
of justice, and cry out with the ancient worshiper, 
"Oh, how I love Thy law! 7 ' He that erases one 
of these commandments makes of your soul a 
deserted house. It is full of joy and language and 
music no more. I speak not simply in the name of 
religion. All the hours and years of this life ask 
you to confess the supreme power of the will, of 
faith, of hope. You can not despise the mighty 
forces without becoming " as a house without inhab- 
itant." Often have we seen within the boundaries 
of a single heart an image of that " deserted 
village" of the poet. 

Sweet smiling village! loveliest of the lawn, 
Thy sports are fled, and all thy charms withdrawn, 
Amidst thy bowers the tyrant's hand is seen 
And desolation saddens all the green. 



THE DvFLUEXCE OF ATHEISM 
UPON MORALS. 



SERMON XIV. 

THE INFLUENCE OE ATHEISM UPON 

MORALS. 



"Lord, thou hast been our dwelling-place in all generations." 
—Psalms 90:1. 

T" ET us inquire, this morning, into the probable 
- L ^ influence of atheism upon morals. Although 
there has always existed among men individuals who 
have avowed their non-belief in any Creator, yet the 
present is perhaps, beyond the custom of the world, 
full of the atheistic spirit. More than is customary 
has our generation studied the material causes of 
things. It has, in a peculiar manner, inquired into 
the development of animal and vegetable life, and 
in this long study has come upon causes not 
formerly seen or even dreamed of in the old 
philosophy. In former times the word God was 
called upon to do an immense service. When a 
glutton died of apoplexy, or a drunkard of a sudden 
spasm of m the heart, the verdict was " Death from 

17 



258 THE INFLUENCE OF 

visitation of God." The word God was used to 
atone for indolence of inquiry or poverty of thought. 
Also superstition loaded down the sacred idea and 
kept the Deity before the world as the performer of 
all sorts of high and low tragedy and comedy. The 
modern study into natural causes has affected not a 
little the relation of a God to an event, and hence 
has perhaps given to the present a little more than 
its share of the materialistic spirit. I need not 
pause to argue the question whether absolute atheism 
is possible. I do not believe that the mind can ever 
reach a perfect assurance that there is no God. But 
there is a practical, or rather influential, atheism 
possible, and not only possible, but in our day such 
a non-belief seems passing beyond its former limited 
proportions. In view of the approximative atheism 
we now witness, it seems timely we should all ask 
ourselves and each other what would be the effect 
upon morals of a widespread disbelief? To inquire 
into the logical relation between atheism and morals, 
is a task worthy of the hour. 

The inquiry is difficult. Had there ever been a 
century in the past from which the idea of a God 
had been excluded, then should we possess some 
data of undoubted worth. Then our atheistic 
friends could not complain that their form of 



ATHEISM UPON MORALS. 259 

thought had never enjoyed the advantage of an 
experiment. We are aware of the falseness of the 
logic which infers the inferiority of woman from her 
actual history, because, never having been free, 
always having been the victim of the superior brute 
force, she stands to-day in the situation of a case 
that has never been tried, where for six thousand 
years the witnesses of one side and the lawyers of 
one side only have addressed the court. Had 
woman been permitted a full and free experiment of 
six thousand years, we should be competent to-day 
to pass judgment upon her relative power of mind 
and spirit. So with atheism. We are aware of the 
difficulty under which it labors. All the nations 
have been in the hands of the theists. The God- 
idea has possessed the laws, the literatures, the arts, 
the home-life, the school, and the Church. In this 
case our argument can only be made up of prob- 
abilities, and can not expand into a demonstration. 
Only an ex parte statement has been heard. 

1. It should weigh somewhat against the claims 
of atheism that the belief in God has always 
hastened to take possession of the human heart. 
The ideas of God and of no God stood upon an 
equal footing when the human race set forth upon 
its career. There were no churchmen standing by 



260 THE INFLUENCE OF 

to prejudice primitive man in favor of that form of 
thought called religion. According to the theory of 
man's origin accepted by the scientists, this race was 
as free to keep away from the belief in a Creator 
as to approach it. Hence, it should weigh some- 
thing against the materialists that man every where, 
in continent or island, fell into the arms of a divine 
philosophy. It amounts almost to a presumption 
against atheism that the human family has granted 
it no nation, and no hundred years even, in which 
to conduct its experiment of unbelief. How came 
the statement to be so ex parte ? 

2. Our second reflection is that the world's 
morals have as a fact descended from a belief in a 
God. However far back we look, the development 
of conscience and virtue is only a form assumed by 
the development of the idea of a Supreme Ruler. 
The human race has always placed in the heavens a 
standard of right and wrong, and has gazed upward 
as if to read there the path of duty. In the oldest 
records of Homer, or Moses, or Zoroaster, of Chaldea, 
Egypt, or India, there is to be seen a Being, above 
human, standing as the supreme right of the uni- 
verse. The Vedas of the old Hindoos all overflow 
with this consciousness of a God. One of these 
sacred books says : " The great Lord of these worlds 



ATHEISM UPON MORALS. 261 

sees as if He were near. A man may think he 
walks by stealth, but the gods know it. If a man 
stands, or walks, or hides ; if two persons whisper 
together, God Varuna knows it. He is there as a 
third. He who should flee far beyond the sky, even 
he would not escape Varuna the king." Such is the 
religious spirit of a literature which two thousand 
years before Christ lay in ten large books spread 
out before an almost countless multitude of souls. 
While Abraham and his followers were looking up 
to Jehovah by faith, influenced by a celestial city 
that had foundations, while Jacob, in a dream, was 
beholding a ladder reaching from earth to sky with 
divine messengers upon the steps, the Aryans were 
moving across India with their hearts as full as 
Jacob's soul was with the presence of God and His 
angels. 

While the Indian millions and Chaldean millions 
were thus drawing their morals from the assumption 
of a God, the Greeks and Latins were preparing to 
take up elsewhere the same belief, and to express it 
both in song and in philosophy. Homer's poem 
opens with the picture of a holy prophet walking 
upon the seashore praying for a justice above human 
justice. The Achilles, whom no battle-field could 
alarm, feared the wrath of the king of Olympus. 



262 THE INFLUENCE OF 

In the old poems of the Greeks there is no one 
impulse more powerful in the bosom of all those 
dramatic characters than the impulse of religion. In 
some of its details religion was false ; in many 
details childish; but there it stood the great power 
that bent the knee of Achilles and Agamemnon and 
the stormy Ajaxes. Even the beautiful Antigone, 
that ideal sister, confessed that she feared not 
man, for there were laws of sisterly affection above 
the laws of man, laws issuing from eternity. In the 
Greek drama, the chorus marched in between acts 
to chant the solemn strains of the deities. All 
through the classic literature there runs a religious 
spirit that shows how the public and private mo- 
rality of that long period was associated as cause 
and effect with the ideas of religion. Some of the 
most powerful passages in the unrivaled oratory of 
that period occur when the Cicero or the Julius 
Caesar appeal for justice to the "immortal gods." 
An old Greek says: "There is no swiftness by 
which one may escape God ; no darkness that may 
conceal from Him." From Virgil and Horace come 
maxims of religion which one might suppose stolen 
from the Psalms of David or the Wisdom of 
Solomon. Epictetus said: "Relation to Caesar gave a 
sense of freedom and security void of all fear ; shall 



ATHEISM UPON MORALS. 263 

not, then, the idea of having Gocl for our Maker 
and Father deliver us from all terror or grief?" 
The same pagan says: " Above all pleasures place 
the consciousness that you are obeying God." 

It would require days, even weeks, to quote irom 
antiquity all it has uttered about God. One would 
as well attempt to convey to you an idea of the 
tropics by bringing you a leaf or flower or an 
imprisoned song-bird, as by a word or a phrase 
attempt to show you how the idea of God filled the 
atmosphere of that old but half-forgotten world. 
You err greatly, my friends, if in pondering over 
the relation of morality and religion you follow 
only that branch of religion that has come down 
from Bethlehem. An argument based upon Chris- 
tianity alone would indeed be powerful ; but why 
look upon a class of men when all the human 
family marches before you in one solid army? Why 
gaze at an island only when before you lies a 
magnificent world? The simple fact is that as far 
back as we can look we find wicked men fearing 
the shadow of God, good men loving it; we see by 
every stream the altar of worship, and thither 
repairing not only children and vestals arrayed in 
white, but the wisest and greatest also repairing 
thither in the garments of philosophy. 



264 THE INFLUENCE OF 

The stream of public morals having thus poured 
down through all history from the mountains of 
religion, from what source will atheism draw morals 
when it shall have abolished these fountains? It is 
necessary that a river like the Nile should have an 
adequate source. Such a stream overflowing all 
Egypt, changing itself into a sea once each year, 
must possess some where a reason for that uprising 
of waters. No rains fall in Egypt. Under skies 
that are never clouded that mysterious stream begins 
to rise, and day and night for weeks its waters 
creep over the banks and widen out over the wide 
plains. Science for three thousand years sought the 
solution of the mystery, and at last found it in the 
wonderful rainstorms that beat at the fountains of 
the river four thousand miles away. 

The stream of public morals has thus come down 
from far-off influences. It has overflowed the vales 
of human life. This sacred water has flowed to the 
altar where the bride has stood, where the child has 
received baptism, where the dirge has been chanted 
for the dead. It has given spiritual life to the 
statesman, images to the poet, eloquence to the 
orator, joy to the honorable, fear to the wicked. 
With the fear of God removed, whence shall come 
any more this great overflow of a stream so grand 



ATHEISM UPON MORALS. 265 

and life-giving? What mountains can atheism rear 
that can equal these mountains of religion's holy 
feelings and holy faith? What rain-storm can it 
cause to beat that shall equal that great storm of 
divine justice and love that falls from the windows 
of Heaven upon the springs of piety ? Whence 
is atheism to draw its mighty Nile of virtue and 
peace? 

It has two replies ready so far as we know. It 
may, indeed, possess others, but they have escaped 
my attention or memory. 1. The respect and love 
of mankind are motive enough and reward enough 
of a virtuous life. This is the plea of the French 
atheists. They confessed humanity to be God 
enough. While we confess the dignity of such an 
affection, and that it has inspired many a heart to 
noble action, yet it would seem unable to produce 
a morals beautiful enough, or universal enough, or 
powerful enough, or cheerful enough, to meet the 
wants of society. In the day of its trial it did not 
meet the expectation of its advocates. The French- 
men who cast themselves upon this worship of man 
did not rise up as under the spell of a new and 
superior religion, but they sunk as though their 
hearts had been emptied of a once powerful inspira- 
tion. The davs of the French revolution and the 



266 THE INFLUENCE OF 

half century following showed that the worship of 
humanity could not lift the spirit upward as it was 
lifted by the harp of Isaiah, or by the prayers of 
Epictetus, or by the holy cross of our Lord. The 
songs of the Red Republicans were a poor spiritual 
food compared with Zion's songs, which broke the 
hearts of Judah's daughters in a strange land, or 
which echoed in the " misereres" and "glorias' 5 of 
the seventeenth century. 

The worship of humanity became a worship of 
food, and drink, and pleasure; and handed over to a 
merciful oblivion those who turned away from 
Heaven's God to fling their offerings upon man's 
altar. The votaries of this new morals never soared 
up to eloquence. They failed to become Pauls, 
ready to die for virtue ; they failed to imitate 
Savonarola as missionaries against vice ; they found 
no French eloquence on their lips such as had made 
kings penitent in the days of Bossuet and Massillon. 
Their religion languished as a piety and expanded 
only as a despair. Coming to a lofty intellect like 
August Comte, it only turned into a philosophic 
obscurity and sadness that became readily a poetry 
bat never a salvation. 

Furthermore, what was that humanity which 
these philosophers so loved that their sentiment was 



ATHEISM UPON MORALS. 261 

dignified as a religion? What was that human race 
whose memory was all the immortality the good 
man might desire ? Alas, for their argument, this 
stream of life which so touched that school had 
been made beautiful in the temple of religion. Out 
of that sanctuary had come Seneca with his high 
philosophy, Aurelius with his virtue, St. Louis with 
his prayers, Beatrice with her beauty of soul, Dante 
with his poetry, Angelo with his subjects, Massillon 
with his eloquence, the orators with their rights of 
man, the Church with its charity. If the worship 
of man be indeed so noble it is unfortunate for 
atheism that religion had to come first and create 
such a charming humanity. And yet such is the 
dilemma. Into that web of life so loved by the 
followers of Comte, religion, Pagan and Christian, 
has interwoven its many beautiful threads. The 
human race, so beautiful, had made its charming 
toilet in the temple of the gods. 

The second reply of atheism is this: As a fact 
it has produced great characters. It points to a few 
minds great in talent, and learning, and usefulness, 
and spiritual peace. I confess the splendor of those 
names, which have become representatives of a world 
without a God. In learning, some of them have 
stood among the highest ; in purity of life they 



268 THE INFLUENCE OF 

have equaled the saints. There are human pictures 
in the gallery of atheism that long detain the 
spectator with their lines of beauty. But before 
these grand portraits we make these two reflections. 
First, the atheism was not complete. In all the 
days and years of those men God stood before them 
as a possibility. He passed by at times as a shadow 
or as a radiance. He came not, indeed, as drawn by 
the Calvinistic or Roman articles, but came as the 
eternal Alpha and Omega, trailing His garments in 
the sunset, or whispering upon the colossal harp of 
nature, whose frame is made of worlds and whose 
strings are the rays of streaming light ; came not as 
a fear ; not as a vengeance ; but as the universal 
Mind from which all souls have fallen as pollen 
from the anthers of flowers. There are lofty minds 
so gifted with sensibility and so full of skepticism's 
tears that in their highly-wrought spirits an almost 
invisible outline of a Creator wakes up more of the 
music of religion than other souls less divine ever 
draw from their whole Trinity or from a whole 
Pantheon. 

Second reflection: There exists no individual in 
the w^hole world who stands for only his own belief. 
Each child of the nineteenth century is the product 
of the eighteenth and seventeenth centuries, and of 



ATHEISM UPON MORALS. 269 

all former times. No soul can live an absolute life. 
Each person in this assembly is three or four 
thousand years old. Not only were the features of 
the modern face wrought out in France, Germany, 
and England, but there also the soul lay and took 
its shape of sentiment. Our souls are vases into 
which the past poured not its ashes, but its faith. 
Hence, what atheists there are in the present are 
not standing up in a moral or a mental greatness 
all their own, but in a consciousness and conscience 
gradually fashioned in days where the mothers 
bowed in prayer, and where all the music and 
eloquence of Christianity molded the sentiments. 
The customs and maxims of life surrounding the 
atheist of to-day are not customs and maxims of his 
own, but of the theism in minds and hearts that 
have come down through the atmosphere of a piety 
and have been colored in its religious hues. The 
atheists of to-day are, therefore, not the results of 
the worship of humanity, but they are still the 
results of a history that has every where been full 
of the Supreme Being. A man may reject the 
creed of yesterday, but he can not reject its influ- 
ence any more than he can command his forehead 
to become low or his intellect to go back to the 
stolidity .of the times of King Alfred. Hence, the 



270 THE INFLUENCE OF 

atheists of to-day stand half-clad at least in the 
beautiful robes of an old religion. As it required 
thousands of years for religion to build up the 
shape of human character we now witness on earth, 
and as the shapings of society come after long 
processes of education, and long successions of life 
and death, so atheism will not dare come into this 
passing century, and, picking out a lofty philosopher 
here and there, say, " These are my proofs of the 
adequacy of unbelief." It would be necessary for 
one or two centuries to come and go, all empty of 
God — centuries in which no daughter or wife looked 
toward Heaven, in which no philosopher or states- 
man saw in eternity any idea of right, or in 
immortality any reward — before the advocates of a 
society without God can point us to a man or 
woman of their own make ; can point us to the 
unalloyed results of their system. 

It would be begging the question to declare that 
those results springing forth from the worship of 
only humanity would be pitiable. I do not know 
what kind of men and women would stand upon 
earth in a hundred years after religion had been 
withdrawn. But we may scarcely doubt that earth 
would retreat in its departments of morals, and 
beauty, and power. Man is fashioned by ideals. As 



ATHEISM UPON MORALS. 271 

all the painters and sculptors have shaped their skill, 
have drawn their inspiration from ideal faces more 
beautiful than life, so the moral quality in the soul 
has shaped itself before the mirror in which lay the 
infinite love and purity. As the army of Moses 
inarched toward the pillar of cloud and fire, so the 
army of all men has marched toward that ideal of 
holiness which we call God, filling all space with its 
radiance. Of all visions that have cheered and 
directed and inspired man, the vision of God and 
immortality has been the chief. Atheism w r ould be 
an awful destruction of ideals. To make man 
look downward instead of up, to look backward 
instead of into endless life, to ask the heart to 
exchange God's temple for the forum, to ask woman 
to look away from the Infinite purity and find her 
virtue only in the laws of the state, this would be 
such a destruction of ideals as a soul fashioned like 
the human soul could not bear, we fear, without 
sinking like that morning star, Lucifer, from the 
light of heaven down to hell's rayless gloom. The 
soul is not shaped by the actual but by the ideal. 

Permit me to add one reflection more. If the 
difficulty of atheism lies partly in its never having 
been granted a time and field of experiment, so 
theism labors under a similar embarrassment. It, 



272 THE INFLUENCE OF 

too, has had no time and no place. At no time has 
there been before the human race a truthful image 
of the Creator. If you point to Christ, the reply is 
that the world has failed to see the Christ. It imme- 
diately clothed Him in its own half -vile raiment, and 
mingled Heaven's beauty with earth's deformity. 
We can truly say that theism has never enjoyed a 
career of light and liberty. It has had to pass 
along, with its divine wings plucked of their plumes 
by the ignorance of men, and with millstones of 
diabolism fastened to those feet that were made for 
floors of sapphire. All along, the Christian's God 
has been degraded and made to build the fires of 
torture where martyrs have died; made to forge the 
fetters of slaves ; made to consign men to hell for 
ever from " mere good pleasure," and made to call 
those His saints who have been unworthy of the 
association of even good men. For eighteen hundred 
years our God has lain like a Prometheus chained 
to the Church's rock, the vulture of human 
ignorance at His vitals, and the links of lame 
humanity festering in His flesh. 

There Prometheus lay, chained to the cold rocks of Caucasus; 

The vulture at his vitals, and the links 
Of the lame Lemnian festering in his flesh. 

When we mark in what distorted shape the ages 



ATHEISM UPON MORALS. 273 

past accepted of its God, how they transformed Him 
into the likeness, not simply of man, but even of 
wicked man, we can not but wonder that the human 
race has drawn from His worship so much of 
spiritual power and beauty. But if thus seen 
through a dark glass, the idea of God has so molded 
all thought and character, what will atheism ever 
bring to place alongside that conception of the 
Creator that is now trying to burst into the world 
through the windows of a holier temple ? If the 
altars of religion helped man even when those altars 
asked man to go forth to cruel war and cruel 
persecution, what may not the human race expect 
from them when the only beings that shall bow 
before them shall be brothers, saints, penitents, and 
the only angels above that new mercy-seat shall be 
the seraph of love and the cherub of light? 

18 



THE TRUE LIBERALISM. 



SERMON XV. 

THE TRUE LIBERALISM. 



"Forbid kirn not, for he that is not against us is for us." — 
Lake 9:50. 

T~N times when the words " liberal" and "liberal 
-*- Christians," and " broad" and " broadness" are 
flying from all the open mouths of the present, 
from some accompanied by derision, from others 
with delight, it seems our duty to pause long 
enough to define the terms. To-day I shall discuss 
before you the real meaning of the word ." Liber- 
ality." 

How full the air is of this word! This idea 
of liberalism assumes many different names, and, 
entering the bodies of a hundred different words, 
is flying around like birds in the air or moving like 
troops upon the battle-field. There are two parties 
in the world beneath this flight of words. One 
party loves all these sounds that express in one way 
or another what they call "advanced ideas," while 



278 THE TRUE LIBERALISM. 

the other party cordially hates the same group of 
expressions and feels that they are the watchwords 
of an advancing Satan. To them "liberality" is 
the highway to atheism. 

This "liberalism" has been in the world so long 
that there must be something real and tangible 
about it. In a most unexpected moment it came 
from the lips of Christ when some of his impetuous 
disciples wished him to check some men who seemed 
to be acting as Christians without having received 
a direct commission. To the amazement of the 
disciples, we doubt not, Christ commanded that they 
be let alone, for they were doing something for the 
kingdom. They had a desire to serve the Master, 
and that desire was too valuable to be checked by 
any rebuke. 

No doubt "liberalism" is as old as human 
thought. From what we see in the history of 
Athens and Rome there must always have been 
men in each period of the world who were busy 
protesting against certain old forms of custom and 
idea. Indeed, this is not a matter of conjecture. 
From old India, full of despotism, there arose poets 
who sung of liberty. In Greece, full of the poly- 
theistic idea, there arose minds that declared the 
Divine Unity, and for a more spiritual worship. 



THE TRUE LIBERALISM. 279 

One of the Greek sages did not desire to be called 
a citizen of Athens, but of the world. He did not 
love the law of caste, of exclusiveness, popular 
among the Athenians. 

Each age having thus revealed a shape of liber- 
ality, it must be that "liberalism" possesses a spirit 
that the student may find and analyze. It is an old 
and a large body; it would be wonderful if it 
should have no soul. We can not believe such a 
statement. There must be a soul in it, and we 
imagine that soul is a noble one. 

The spirit of liberalism must consist of the wish 
to gather up the most general ideas of politics, 
ethics, or religion. The word " broadness '' must 
result from this quality. There are in all systems 
two sets of ideas, a local and temporary group doing 
duty in their day, and a universal and lasting group 
doing duty for ever. In our government the ideas 
of currency or internal improvements or tariff are 
less permanent than the ideas of liberty and 
equality. " Broadness " must be a mental tendency 
to estimate and love these less changing ideas. 
Such must have been the inspiration of the public 
orator who declared slavery to be sectional and 
freedom national. When, on the opposite, Dr. 
Palmer, and Jefferson Davis rallied to the support of 



280 THE TRUE LIBERALISM. 

slavery, they illustrated narrowness by giving their 
great intellects to a perishable fact. 

Any one looking at Christianity will perceive that 
it moves forward amid two sets of facts; that the 
facts of one class are changeable as the clouds 
upon the sky; that the facts of the other class are 
permanent as the deep blue back of the clouds. It 
is known to all the lovers of nature that the clouds 
never repeat their forms in the West. Never twice 
does the setting sun give the admiring world the 
same picture. 

Thus, in Christianity, no two eras arrange alike 
the religious details. The revivals, the service, the 
sermons, the prayers, the hymns, the music, the 
ceremonies, change like the toilet of the worshipers. 
More than this, doctrines change, and out of a 
hundred ideas that enter an age, only a tenth will 
come forth meaning what they meant, or retaining 
the love they enjoyed when they passed into the 
gates of the epoch. Ideas rush into a century much 
like the " charge of the six hundred." Beautiful is 
their equipment, bright their armor, nodding and 
white their plumes, but after the thunder of battle 
has passed by, how few are the warrior truths that 
remain ! The field is covered with the dead. 

Now, it must be that true liberalism is an effort 



THE TRUE LIBERALISM. 281 



to find the unchanging truths, the heroes that never 
die, and to enlist under their banner. It is no 
pleasing outlook of life if, after one has given his 
days of work and sorrow to doctrines, these doctrines 
are all to perish, to be put aside as men throw away 
old raiment. Why should one toil and fight and 
even die for the pope, or for the conservation of 
slavery, or for the divine right of kings, if just after 
us are to come generations who will build up a wide 
freedom without slave or pope or king upon the 
ruins of one's life and thought? All the disappoint- 
ments of the past, all the labors that have come to 
naught, all the broken hearts sleeping in forgotten 
graves, combine to warn you against idolizing the 
transient of thought and to implore you to give 
j T our soul to the fewer but grander truths that are 
perpetual. 

Why labor for the meat that perisheth? 

To many the word "liberality" carries within it 
all the terrors of "infidelity" or "atheism." The 
last lesson the multitude will learn is that the most 
of their beloved ideas are transient. The venerable 
father supposes the tune he sings without time or 
melody is to be sung forever. The multitude refuse 
to realize that any thing valuable will come after 
them. A& a little child takes up its new hoop or 



282 THE TRUE LIBERALISM. 

new top as though the game and pleasure were to 
be for eternity, so the majority of the human race 
press the customs of to-day to their bosoms as 
though millions of years hence they should thus 
stand, like Dante's two lovers transformed into 
eternal ice when their lips met. Any one coming 
to this multitude with any hint that their ideas will 
nearly all perish, will fall like Autumn leaves, comes 
always with all the hideousness of an infidel. While 
one part of humanity is made up of childish 
prejudice, the other part will always seem to be 
infidel. 

Of course, there is a line where liberalism fades 
away into unbelief. But all thinking is perilous. 
The search for evidence is dangerous, for it builds 
up a love of proof which at last religion may fail 
to gratify. Liberalism may seek for the unchanging 
until amid the enigmas of the world, it shall cry 
out: "All is vanity," and confess no faith. But 
while the peril of the liberal spirit is great, the 
peril of the narrow spirit is vastly greater. For 
each soul marred or ruined by too much breadth, 
one can point to myriads rendered frightful by their 
assumption that the little ideas in their hands were 
the eternal wish of God. The bloody record of the 
past drew nearly all its crimson from multitudes who 



THE TRUE LIBERALISM. 283 

would not look beyond their feet, but who thought 
the little doctrines they held were the everlasting 
laws of nature, and that the bloody psalm they sang 
was the sublime chant of eternity. While, then, the 
world embarks upon the career of liberality with 
some risk, the peril can never equal that which lay 
before the human family when it set forth thousands 
of years ago upon a career of narrowness. After 
the perils of belief, through which man has come, 
he has little to fear from the occasional evils of a 
higher rationalism. There will never be atheism 
enough in the world to cause a return of the sorrows 
once brought by credulity. 

But, secondly, liberalism is not impelled by 
simply the love of the most true, but also by the 
love of the most useful. Its spirit is not simply 
philosophic, but also practical. All philosophy is 
humane. Not only are there sets of ideas that exist 
forever, but there are ideas that are constantly 
useful. All the glory of religion has come into the 
world by a few gates. The beautiful characters seen 
in the temple of religion were made by a few great 
agencies of the spiritual kingdom. Daniel left us no 
record of much else than a life of prayer. Enoch 
simply walked with God. Abraham looked up to 
Heaven. All that redeems the names of David and 



284 THE TRUE LIBERALISM. 

Solomon was their penitence. The richness of their 
temple service counts for naught. Isaiah comes to 
us sacred in the simple light of piety. The glory 
of St. John lies in his near friendship with Christ. 
The fame of Aurelius as a religious being grows up 
out of his piety. The Saint Louis became exalted, 
not by being a Catholic, but by his unrivaled 
spirituality. Bossuet enjoys an immortality that 
comes not from the book he wrote against the 
Protestants, but from the plain truths of righteous- 
ness which he thundered forth in presence of kings. 
In his own day the people worshiped him because 
of his argument against the Protestant world, but 
the mistaken people and their adulation died along 
with the book, and then a permanent gratitude 
began to come up from the world over the perpetual 
ideas that ran through that old eloquence. Pascal 
was not assisted any by the accidental in his 
religion, but only by the few ideas that he found 
like a few grains of wheat in a great tomb of 
mummies. His girdle of thorns, his fastings, his 
hatred of so-called pleasure, his solemnities, all 
count nothing in the subsequent eras, but the 
golden ideas which he washed patiently from a shore 
of dirt and sand declare to-day the splendor of his 
soul. Thus all the mighty virtues of yesterday 



THE TRUE LIBERALISM. 285 

come down to us from only a few gates, and 
liberalism, perceiving this, refuses to give its heart 
to any other ideas than those out of which the 
highest virtue, the immortal goodness of man, has 
come. Why, when all the long pathway of man is 
strewn with the wrecks of little, frail ideas, and 
adorned with monuments of great truths alone, 
should the children of to-day forget this impressive 
scene and worship again at altars which will soon 
become deserted of man and God? Look, for 
example, at Sir Thomas More. From the blemish 
found in his narrow Romanism, from the effect of 
his pamphlets against Luther and Tyndale, from the 
consent he gave to persecution, his name has been 
beautifully rescued by the single conception of 
integrity that lay in his bosom like an image of the 
Almighty. When Henry VIII. attempted to frighten 
him into signing a wicked law, he replied, " Terrors 
are for children, not for me ! y Thus righteousness 
is seen to be an immortal law of human life. A 
true " liberalism," therefore, is only a human mind 
out in pursuit of that which has brought to the 
human family the most of good, and withdrawing 
the heart's love from all that is less worthy, it 
concentrates its affection where the worship of to-day 
will not be the contempt of to-morrow. 



286 THE TRUE LIBERALISM. 

As liberalism is the seeker of the wider truth 
and the more permanent usefulness, so its opposite is 
the dissipation of the soul's forces over what is not 
of long life nor of value while it lives. The great- 
est usefulness comes from the concentration of love 
upon objects the most noble. The moment a man 
finds time or the disposition to love some small rite 
or ceremony, that moment his heart has divided up 
its current. Instead of flowing into the sea majes- 
tically like the Amazon, its love spreads out like the 
delta of the Nile into a hundred channels, through 
no one of which can an ocean ship pass. Any great 
truth sailing up toward such a heart must anchor 
on the outside. 

Having now viewed theoretic liberality and hav- 
ing found it to be a philosophy and a utility, let us 
note now some of its theoretic duties. All relations 
involve duties. A citizen, a father, a friend, a painter, 
a poet, must confess duties that spring up from the 
peculiar qualities that give him the special name. 
Thus liberalism, unless it be only a shadow, must 
confess its own peculiar duties. Let us attempt to 
find some of these. (1.) It must tolerate all the 
many shades of Christian belief. It must seek to 
remove them, but must still love those who hold 
them. If, as this proud system claims, it seeks and 



THE TRUE LIBERALISM. 287 

respects great general facts, it is bound to confess 
that the unchanging, immortal truth is difficult of 
attainment, and that a heart that should hate the 
narrow would be driven to misanthropy, and hate all 
mankind. One of the general truths which that 
philosophy must early bind up in its sacred bundle 
must be that love toward all men is the highest 
duty. This is an imperishable generality. 

A second reason for this tolerance, and even 
affection, may be found in the fact that while the 
accidental ideas are living their brief life ; while they 
are fluttering like ephemeral insects in a sunbeam 
that is to be at once the morning and evening light 
of their life, many who hold them are being led 
along to immortality, not by the ephemeral ideas, 
but by the very ideas of liberalism living beneath. 
Though the candle and the censer, and even the 
pope, of the Romanist, are false and worthless tenets 
and will pass away, yet in the bosoms of millions 
who hold these tenets there is flowing along the 
very river of truth, which the philosophers love as 
imperishable. There is no process by which all the 
human family may be transformed into philosophers. 
All are on the march toward that destiny, and this 
should give the wise men joy enough for the day. 
The majority are broad, though their theory be narrow. 



288 THE TRUE LIBERALISM. 

While devotion to the transient is an injury, a drawing 
of the heart away from the great, yet in our age the 
narrowness is larger in theory than in life, for with 
the exception of here and there an individual, Chris- 
tians are holding to the small ideas with only a 
gentle grasp, and are daily becoming more and more 
heirs of a full emancipation. If you will select two 
churches of this city; if you will choose from the 
hundreds of sanctuaries two seemingly so far apart 
as the Second Presbyterian and the Grace Episcopal 
Churches, and will, by a careful analysis, examine the 
souls that worship at those two shrines, you will find 
no marked qualities that distinguish between the 
two throngs. Coming from the same avenues and 
from the same conditions of life, the faith, and hope, 
and character, of the two groups are the same. 
Both trees will let fall the same fruit in the autumn 
of the grave. This resemblance comes to pass from 
the fact that only an ignorant age can be the perfect 
slave of minor ideas, and that in our century these 
two representative congregations are children of only 
general truths, and are carrying along with them a 
diversity that is becoming external, getting ready, 
like the chrysalis of the butterfly, to fall away and 
go back to dust, handing over the inmate to wings. 
Around those two meeting-houses an immense Chris- 



THE TRUE LIBERALISM. 289 

tianity stands, enlarging the organ tones within by 
the responses of its deeper voice. The diversity of 
the two temples is neutralized by the unity of the 
surrounding century. 

When a philosophic liberalism shall gather up the 
phenomena of church life as carefully as it seeks the 
general principles of religion, it will find much of its 
own breadth every where ; will find itself able to 
join in the service of Episcopalian or Presbyterian 
without any other feeling than that of gratitude to 
God that all over earth His children have an altar 
for their hour of deep worship and meditation. The 
Unitarian who can not at times worship with the 
orthodox because of the errors in the book of the 
latter, has degraded his liberalism into a narrowness, 
for its mission being to find and love the general 
and lasting in thought, it is compelled to mark and 
love the general and lasting in the human soul. The 
truly broad churchman can worship in all temples, 
for as musical tones can be heard further than un- 
pleasing sounds, so the divine parts of the service 
only will reach his spirit, his soul being too far up- 
ward to be reached by the notes that are discordant. 

Having alluded now to the philosophy and the 
duties of liberalism, let us ask something about its 
associations in history. They have been both good 



290 THE TBTJE LIBERALISM. 

and bad. The theory is pure, but as nothing can 
pass through the hands of humanity without 
becoming soiled, so this mode of thought has often 
found its injurious extreme. Of all theories of 
government, that of a republic is the truest, but in 
the hands of actual men democracy has often ground 
the people with a severity equal to that of a 
despotism. An unjust tax sanctioned by a ballot- 
box is as hard to be borne as a similar tax levied 
by a king. Thus all good theories are made corrupt 
by passing through defective souls. Into such a 
world come all the ideals of the intellect and heart, 
and become stained like the marbles carried from 
God's hills, or the studio of the sculptor into the 
smoky cities of man. Thus liberalism has often 
rushed madly forward into the recklessness of a 
6w free religion," or of an unbelief that discards all 
spiritual ideas. But the evil in its history has not 
been as great as the good. One may safely claim 
that the large part of the world's blessings have 
come from those minds that have hastened to 
separate the great from the small. Out of an 
entangled worship Socrates tried to deduce the unity 
and greatness of God. Paul became immortal by 
his effort to make the word Jew give place to the 
word human. Dante and Milton revolted against 



THE TRUE LIBERjVLISM. 291 

kings, that they might espouse the broader cause of 
mankind. All the orators have built up their fame 
on the basis of only the broad and everlasting ideas 
of earth. Out of the transient no eloquence has 
ever been born. Liberalism has always been the 
coming of God, so far as God has ever come to His 
children. Paul, Luther, Wesley are places where 
the ceremonial gave place to the spiritual and the 
eternal. Permit me now to mention one name from 
which I have deduced what little of this broad 
philosophy it may be my happiness to possess. All 
of you are aware that there are many persons who 
look with horror upon all those who dare raise the 
banner of a broader Christianity. Mistaking their 
early associations for wisdom, and standing afar 
from mankind and near only to self, they carry a 
heart full of bitterness toward the disciples of 
general rather than of local and special ideas. It 
ought to be a matter of interest with these to 
know the fountain whence comes the true Christian 
liberalism which is rising within our century, and 
which is destined to blow like a sweet south wind 
over the centuries to come. But let us pronounce 
the name of the one mighty intellect which, more 
than all others, has sown in the Church the seeds 
of this harvest, of poisonous plants as some say, but 



292 THE TRUE LIBERALISM. 

of golden grain indeed destined to be the food of 
the future ! Let us pronounce the name and then 
ask those whose bosoms are full of alarm to call 
him " infidel," or " destroyer!" The name! The 
name! Ah! here it is — Jesus Christ of Bethlehem! 
There is the fountain whence roll the transparent 
waters of this broad philosophy. Far beyond all 
beings who have ever lived Christ was the broadest. 
His ideas are all imperishable. He cast out the 
temporary that had come clown from Moses; He 
made the old iron-bound Sabbath die in the field 
where the sweet wheat was ripening; He saw the 
human soul in Lazarus, in Magdalen, in little 
children ; He rebuked the disciples when they 
desired to draw the sword of their sect ; He uttered 
few of the ideas that enter into the modern 
differences between denominations ; He preached a 
discourse, every word of which falls not upon 
Judea, but upon the whole earth; a sermon under 
which all men have written the word " forever." 
There have been broad minds in all times. In our 
day men love to repeat the names of illustrious 
intellects, and praise them for ''advanced thought." 
But much of this modern " broad thought" is only 
a denial or a silence. While the heart beats in 
man with its infinite longings, he can never be 



THE TRUE LIBERALISM. 293 

styled u broad" who studies science and omits the 
soul. He is a partial, a half soul, who does nothing 
but debate over our dust. Christ is the true 
" liberalist," because He did not take refuge in 
silence or doubt, but boldly uttered His creed, and 
in such terms that it suits alike those of all times 
and continents. 

The true Christian liberalism is, then, only the 
gradual coming of a time that changes not, of a 
beautiful that does not fade, of a good that turns 
not into a sorrow. The old Hebrew ritual became 
a burden. Its material objects became tiresome as 
soon as man grew larger within. As the philoso- 
phers love at last the pleasures of truth more than 
the pleasures of food and drink, so when the world 
reached development, it flung away the washings of 
hands and the killing of sacrifices, and worshiped 
the invisible. It took refuge in the spiritual Christ. 
Then the Roman age came with its higher externals, 
but again the world moved on in the great Refor- 
mation of the sixteenth century. And onward it 
will still move. The liberalism of you and me may 
be defective. Beyond doubt it is. It may possess 
too little piety and too little power to grasp all the 
facts. But coming generations will do God's will 
more perfectly and sweetly, and fling us 'aside as 



294 THE TRUE LIBERALISM. 

we throw down the follies of our fathers, and will 
find the fullness of the stature of Christ, as far as 
our most extravagant dream. He who stood at the 
gates of our era nineteen hundred years ago and 
turned mankind toward a spiritual religion, contains 
within His infinite heart other blessings beyond 
those the nations have yet gathered, for in the 
kingdom of grace, as in the kingdom of nature, 
spring and harvest come in an endless succession. 



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Jansen, McC lurg & C° 



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CATON.— A Summer in Norway, with Notes on the Indus, 
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Climate and Productions, and of the Red Deer, Reindeer, and 
Elk, by Hon. J. D. Caton, LL.D. 8vo., 401 pages. Illustrated. 
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lk The tone of the book is frank, almost colloquial, always communicative and 
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CHARD.— Across the Sea, and Other Poems. ByTHos. 
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HEWITT.-" Our Bible." Three Lectures, delivered at Unity 

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LAMARTINE.— Craziella; a Story of Italian Love. 

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MASON.— Mae Madden. A Story; by Mrs. Mary Mur- 
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MILLER.— First Fam'lies of the Sierras. A Novel; by 
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MULLER.— Memories; A Story of German Love. Translated 
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SWING.-Trial Of Prof. Swing. The Official Report of this 
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